Not online: the recording is held by the project and is not on Media Collections Online, YouTube or archive.org. Everything below is a paraphrase of a machine transcript, the weaker of this site's two transcript layers — see how it was made.
Recording with Zbirzher in Ribnitz (Rybnitsa) on 26 June 2018. The first part opens with arranging chairs and a signature for the interview, then Kerler states the date and place and asks about Yiddish names for the town, the speaker's birth year, his parents' language, his grandfather and his name. Most of the rest is Zbirzher reciting his own Russian verse about his childhood in Ribnitz before and at the start of the war, with a few Yiddish interjections and questions from Kerler and a second voice. Second half of a session with Zbirzher in Ribnitz (Rybnitsa), 2018. It is mostly in Russian, with a few Yiddish exchanges with Kerler and a second person. The interviewee finishes a point about a chess partner and then tells a long story of his wartime childhood: a month in Ribnitz after the invasion, flight by horse cart, bombing along the way, Rostov, Stalingrad, and Stalinabad (Dushanbe), with American aid. After a pause he returns to a roadside episode with German motorcyclists and a plane near Dnepropetrovsk. The recording ends with him talking about the poems he writes.
Opening and arrangements: chairs and a table are found, Kerler sets up the camera, and the informant chats about America and Indians. The team asks for his signature for the interview in Russian, and Kerler comments that this is the first time the interview is in Yiddish.
Kerler states the date (26 June 2018) and place, Ribnitz, and asks what the town was called in Yiddish and about Kishinev. Zbirzher gives his birth year as 1985 (?) in the transcript, but gives his age as 85, so he was born about 1933. He says he spoke Yiddish with his mother, father and grandmothers. He names his paternal grandfather, Nune (?), and gives a Yiddish name, Yisroel, with the home form Srulik (?), then says he does not know where the family name Zbirzher comes from.
Kerler asks to record on camera and Zbirzher agrees. Zbirzher explains in Russian that he writes poetry in Russian and some in Yiddish, and discusses the difference between Yiddish words for song and poem. He says he wrote a poem about his childhood last year for his birthday, and Kerler asks him to read it in Russian.
Zbirzher recites his Russian poem about his childhood, starting from the birthday and the number 84, then from his birth in 1933 (the famine year). He tells of his mother's hunger and his father as a carter, the house on Gorky Street by the Dniester, and the war interrupting plans for a new house. He recalls bathing horses and being thrown into the water at five.
A second man asks whether he swore in Russian or Yiddish as a child, and Kerler says it matters for the record. Zbirzher recalls a Yiddish curse and says older boys taught him to defend himself with a knuckleduster. He recalls bread with jam and children stealing it.
Zbirzher continues the poem and recalls the outbreak of war in 1941: bombing raids on Ribnitz, anti-aircraft guns, and German airmen shot down and taken to the militia. The Germans targeted the Dniester railway bridge, and the family stayed a month before fleeing by cart. He then mentions a chess partner, Nikolai Krylov, aged 90, and Kerler asks where he comes from.
The interviewee is asked about a chess partner named Krylov Nikolay, who is nearly 90 and understands Yiddish. They try to place where this man comes from, a village in the Yampol district near Kamenka (?). The interviewee recalls that the Germans took Ribnitz only on 13 August after a long defence, and that the man has lived in Ribnitz for about thirty years, having worked at a cannery near Dubossary.
The interviewee describes leaving Ribnitz by horse cart in 1941. His mother, his grandmother Leah, his father's brother's wife with three children and a grandmother (Hove (?)) travelled in two carts, while the men were called up. The journey east lasted about a hundred days under daily German bombing. They hid in orchards and cornfields and saw dead people and horses. He briefly recites lines of a verse about the flight.
He tells how they reached Rostov at night and found a city with lights on, after months of blackout. They left the horses and cart with a teenager and took a train to Stalingrad. They lived about six months in the village of Nikolskoye in the Stalingrad (Volgograd) region and worked on the kolkhoz harvest. The Germans then approached Stalingrad.
The family travelled to Stalinabad (Dushanbe), where his grandmother Leah's relatives already lived. The route ran by the Volga to Saratov and then by train through Tashkent. They received ration cards, his sick mother did not work, and his father worked on the railway. A month's wage bought only four loaves of bread. He stresses that American aid (dried milk, saccharin, canned meat, clothing) saved them from hunger. They returned in August 1944 to find their house dismantled for fuel, and he says his mother and he lived on a small allowance.
The interviewee offers more episodes. Kerler and S2 steer him toward his childhood years, and he mentions a place named Dabasai (?) and a village whose Russian name is Krasnye Okna, in the Chernyakhov (?) district, in Ukraine. He tells of seeing refugees scatter from the road when German motorcyclists with sidecars passed. Kerler asks the Yiddish word for motorcycle. A second episode takes place near Dnepropetrovsk: they hid in a valley while a German plane strafed them with machine-gun fire twice, and nobody was hurt.
The interviewee says that he composes poems for secular and religious holidays, including Passover and Hanukkah, and posts them at the Hesed society's door. He kept full mourning for a year after his wife died two years ago and wrote nothing then. He now wants to show a list of 66 songs. A social-care worker helps him type them, and he writes by hand on paper.