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 Sigal in Ribnitz (Rybnitsa), 28 June 2018, mostly in Russian. The talk covers a man who bathed in the river in winter, the interviewee's music and a musician uncle, the Jewish settlement of Gershunovka and his family's losses during the evacuation, and arrangements to visit a cousin's family. It ends with blessings and farewells.
Conversation in Russian about a man who bathed in the river in winter. He went into the water at the lower part of the town, was guarded, and never fell ill. The interviewee says he watched this as a child of seven or eight, hidden behind the dam. The opening lines are a brief exchange about the interviewee's Russian and his origin.
The interviewee says he is a Muscovite who grew up in Jerusalem from age twelve or thirteen and flies there every summer. He says he does not play an instrument professionally, loves the guitar and can pick out tunes on the accordion. He then begins to mention a violinist in his family.
The interviewee talks about his uncle Peysakh (Pesach) Sigal, a professional musician who lived in Dubossary and died at 53. The family came from Gershunovka, a purely Jewish settlement founded in 1851 (?) with about a hundred families and houses. Today it has about 85 inhabitants, Poles, Moldovans and Russians, no Jews, and the houses survive.
The interviewee says his father's family came from Gershunovka. His grandfather Itsik died in the evacuation when a cart got stuck at the Dnieper near Zaporozhye, along with the grandfather's brother. Relatives on his mother's side also died: her brother Iosif, his wife Roza and their children Misha, Zorik and Grisha. Another family from Dubossary was lost too, and a memorial plaque in Dubossary commemorates them. Uncle Leyzer Bershatsky fell at the front in Austria.
The interviewee names his mother's family, née Bershatsky, and says he has photographs of his parents and grandparents. He found a prewar gravestone for his maternal grandparents, grandmother Khaya and grandfather Grisha, in the Jewish cemetery. His mother is named Polina, daughter of Gersh. He also names his paternal grandfather Itsik and Itsik's brother. He wants to meet a Bershatsky family in town, who are his cousin and his cousin's wife, but the cousin has refused to see anyone.
The interviewee remembers the war years under bombing, hiding as small children aged eight or nine. Someone is said to speak a little Yiddish, and the interviewee proposes asking Ilya to phone him. A speaker then reflects that Jews are a peace-loving, kind people and offers blessings for long life, joy and good to the listeners and their children.
Thanks and farewells. They discuss tea and coffee, then the arrangements for a visit to the Bershatsky family, with a speaker offered the role of intermediary. A speaker says Yiddish is his field and he understands everything in it. He mentions leaving for work.