Rîbnița(Ribnitz in the project's index)2018-06-265 min · 2 stretchesRussian 95%
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.
Summary
Final file of a seven-part session recorded in Ribnitz (index: Zbirzher), 2018-06-26, spoken almost entirely in Russian. A man explains why he can hardly speak Yiddish and recalls using it with his late wife, then recites a Russian comic song about Chaim and the shop. The Yiddish lines are noise and the Russian lines carry the content.
Stretches
00:00–02:58
A speaker urges that a Jewish gathering ought to be conducted in Yiddish and asks for some Yiddish speech, even a song. The man answers in Russian that he would like to hear Yiddish, but it is not on television and can be found only on a computer. He says his late wife, who died two years ago, spoke it fluently and he poorly. They used it on the street so that neighbours and outsiders would not understand. He adds that local Jews have become Russified and he knows little Yiddish, and offers to sing a song with commentary.
The man recites in Russian a comic song about Chaim, who is told to close his little shop. It tells of his wife who bears children year after year, and of Chaim's death and the children who keep coming. The song is performed in Russian, not Yiddish. At the end a voice remarks that young people are being educated.