Beigel says the stories were not told because her parents were always working. She says Hnivan' was a non-Jewish town without Jewish weddings. She talks about her son living in Hnivan' and her two grandsons, lawyers in Kyiv, and describes how the family helps her. She says she is blind in both eyes with glaucoma and cataracts and cannot read or write. Kerler then starts the word questionnaire.
The passage shows her blindness and her sons and grandsons, which the catalogue's label does not mention.
Long dialectological questionnaire in which Beigel gives Yiddish equivalents, often mixed with Russian or Ukrainian words. Items include words for the senses, greetings and wishes such as congratulations and thanks, everyday and household words, pronouns and verb forms, and religious terms such as praying, honest or pious Jew, and Christian. In the middle she tells at length about her youth and marriage. She mentions a Bukovina acquaintance who left for Israel, her husband's wartime imprisonment and later head illness, and her 46 years caring for him. She remarks on her failing memory and that the questioning tires her.
Beyond questionnaire work, she narrates her marriage and her husband's illness and refers to Bukovina Jews.
Beigel's son comes into the apartment while the interview is going on, and the conversation is largely in Russian. She explains to him that the interviewers are from America and Israel and are studying Yiddish words, and jokes that she has become a student in old age. The son brings her laundry.
Further dialectological questions put by Kerler, with Lemster joining in. Items cover grammatical forms (case endings, "on the road", plurals), a Hebrew-derived word for "probably", and words for orphan, wagon, face and proper form of verbs. Kerler also asks about customs vocabulary such as the bridegroom's praying and Hanukkah games, but she says she does not remember them.
