MDV 406 · Iosif Kunovich Burg

Burg reflects on the fate of Yiddish culture. He names Hitler and Stalin as destroyers of Yiddish writers and culture, and the State of Israel as sharing the blame for weakening Yiddish. He lists great Yiddish poets and writers such as Leivick, Manger and Halpern. He notes that Hasidim in Israel still speak Yiddish, and that younger people elsewhere do not. He recounts a Berlin evening commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz and speaking Yiddish there, and receiving letters from Germany about Yiddish study. He tells how the German journalist Michael Martens (Frankfurt) visited him in Chernivtsi and Vyzhnytsia and wrote a small book about him; Kerler remarks on the German interest in Yiddish.

The transcript also shows the Israeli Hebrew-poet recitation as an unnamed Jerusalem poet whose name Burg cannot recall, and his Bnei Brak anecdote.

Burg describes prewar Chernivtsi. Its Jews were largely assimilated, with the German of Berlin and Vienna as their language, alongside a Jewish quarter where only Yiddish was spoken. He characterizes the Czernowitz Yiddish as close to Western European Yiddish, unlike Galician or Bessarabian Yiddish, and says almost no native speaker of it can be found today. He mentions a Bessarabian Yiddish speaker living in Chernivtsi, and Kerler talks about the varieties of Yiddish he has had to speak. The passage opens with a bit of chat about drinking.

The transcript shows an opening bit of informal talk and Burg's discussion of today's speakers of the Chernivtsi dialect.

Burg gives his parents' names and the name of his grandfather, which he gives with a double name, as called to the Torah. He says he was born in Vyzhnytsia in 1912, and Kerler notes the date of this first interview in Chernivtsi (16 May 2003). Burg then shows his decorations: the Austrian and German orders presented by ambassadors, the Cross of Merit, and a Star of David medal from the Ukrainian Jewish Congress. Certificates and the languages they are written in (German, Russian, Ukrainian) are discussed, and Kerler asks if he could travel to Vyzhnytsia.

The transcript also shows the discussion of his grandfather's name as called to the Torah and the interviewer's invitation to travel to Vyzhnytsia.

Burg talks about the Yiddish of his childhood home: his family said tate and mame. He describes the Bukovinian dialect as modelled on the German of Vienna and Berlin, unlike that of the Bessarabian Jews who settled in Chernivtsi. He says the Lithuanian-style stage Yiddish came with the Vilna Troupe, which often visited in the 1930s. Kerler asks whether their speech was actually Litvish, and Burg says it was closer to Galician speech, but with a different sound.

The transcript also shows a comparison of Litvish, Galician and Bukovinian speech and Burg's first contacts in Vienna beginning at the end.

Burg recalls Vienna in 1937, shortly before the Anschluss. He met a circle of Yiddish writers there, including Abraham Fuchs, Mendl Neugroschl, and Turkow, and speaks about Neugroschl's wealthy family and his son in America. He heard Hitler and Goering speak. He describes being seized in the street and taken in a truck with other Jews to barracks outside Vienna for forced labor. He was released after speaking German and showing his Romanian passport, and was driven back to Vienna by SS men. He tells an anecdote of a Galician Jew waiting at a tram stop, and shows a photograph of the writers in Vienna, naming others.

The transcript also shows the Neugroschl family, the Turkow brothers and the identification of writers in a photograph.

Burg tells of his family and early life. His father was a raftsman on the Cheremosh, and his book 'Oyfn Cheremosh' draws on this. Burg's maternal grandfather lived long ago; Burg was Yosef Mordkhe until the Soviet period and Yosele at home. His mother bore five children, two died, and his brother Binyamin was killed in Spain and his sister Chaye died with the mother in the war. At thirteen he left home, lodged with a poor tailor in Chernivtsi, and was helped by his rich uncle Max. He then attended Eliezer Steinberg's Jewish teachers' seminary and gave private lessons. He mentions the editor Shmuel Abba Soifer and the 1934 publication of his first story.