MDV 465 · Naum (Nekhemye) Samoilovich Gaiviker; Sonya (Sosye) Volkovna Gaiviker

In the Hesed office, Lemster and staff look at a portrait on the wall and try to work out who it depicts, perhaps a rabbi; the exchange is brief and mixes Yiddish and Russian.

A Hesed staff woman is asked to sing and says she cannot speak Yiddish but understands it; a song about a wedding is mentioned, and a fragment of another is attempted. Kerler explains that the team wants older songs from grandmothers, not popular ones. The staff suggest other people to visit and discuss how far the synagogue is.

Names a singing fragment and the staff's suggestions of other informants and the synagogue location.

Kerler and Lemster talk with Hesed staff about who in town still knows Yiddish and where to go next. The woman says that her grandson studies Hebrew, not Yiddish, in the Jewish school, and that Yiddish was once taught in Russian letters. She has three children and seven grandchildren, some of them in Israel. A teacher and other elderly speakers are named as possible informants, and Lemster asks whether some Jews have no tie to Hesed. Kerler briefly explains the Yiddish letters.

Adds a recipe question, a Yiddish alphabet explanation and Kerler's search for the oldest speakers.

A Hesed social worker reads aloud a Yiddish poem about Jews speaking Yiddish all over the world, apparently reprinted in a local paper. She and the others discuss its author (the transcript is unclear) and recall an aunt who wrote letters from America in Yiddish.

Adds the discussion of the poem's author and the aunt's letters from America.

The formal interview begins with Gaiviker, aged 95, saying that he speaks Yiddish, Russian and Ukrainian. He lists battles he took part in from the first day of the war, among them Stalingrad, Kursk and Kharkiv, and says he was demobilized from Königsberg. He describes service with aviation ground crews and bombings, and the death of many comrades; Kerler insists the interview be in Yiddish.

Adds Gaiviker's own wartime account and Kerler's request for Yiddish only.

Gaiviker says his father was a barber and that he himself worked for more than sixty years as one, mostly in a central barbershop, and has been home for twenty-odd years. He mentions his wife of sixty-two years, a good cheder education including Rashi, a daughter and grandchildren in Israel. Sonya adds that a daughter lives in Russia. Kerler explains the project's aim of interviewing older Yiddish speakers about prewar history, and asks about the town's earlier name.

Adds Kerler's explanation of the project and the question about the town's former name.

Gaiviker gives his name, Naum Samoilovich, and his Yiddish name Nekhemye, after his grandfather taken into the tsarist army. His parents were Shmuel and Sosye; he lost his mother at six. Born in 1912, on the 27th of September, and he speaks of a jubilee this year. He talks about his hard life today, invalid status, and the loss of comrades.

Gaiviker recalls cheder with the teachers Motl the Black and Khayim from Medzhibozh, and attending prayer with his father. He mentions his stepmother and half-siblings, his youthful mischief, love of music and jazz, and bands passing through Proskuriv in the civil war years. He then complains about the hardship of old age and says he was hospitalized several times.

In 1930 (?) Gaiviker, as a bold young man, took a train to Moscow wanting to live in a big city. He was frightened on arrival, had no ticket home and stayed, working in barbershops; he was later sent to Berdychiv and drafted in 1934.

Gaiviker talks about the severity of peacetime army service in the 1930s: early rising, men who ran away or maimed themselves and were punished, and scarce food.

Gaiviker tells of living in Moscow, a fight at work and being jailed; he says the Jewish official in charge treated him more leniently. In 1933 he and others were sent out of Moscow under the passport regime. Back in Proskuriv he found no work and hunger, and he sold his possessions.

Sonya tells of her husband's childhood: at the age of six he lived through the pogrom in the street where Jews lived. Her account describes hiding in the attic, bandits demanding gold, and the killed Jews found outside. Gaiviker adds that later the Poles came and took his father away for a time.

Adds Sonya's narration, the street where they lived and the later arrival of Poles.

Gaiviker recalls cheder: the teachers Motl and Khayim of Medzhibozh, a teacher's wife, the whip, and a prank of tying a sleeping teacher's beard to the table. He says he studied the siddur and Humash but remembers little. He remembers visiting cantors, among them Shulman and Borskii (?), and singing next to the cantor as a boy. He adds his fear of horses in the cavalry.

Gaiviker describes his cavalry service in the mid-1930s: waking at six in freezing cold, feeding and grooming horses, and how he did not desert because a Jew should not. He then returned to work.

Asked about Jewish holidays in the shtetl, Gaiviker mentions Yom Kippur fasting, Rosh Hashanah and Shavuot. He recalls his father keeping the Sabbath and visiting cantors on holidays. Kerler then proposes a break and a switch to interviewing his wife.

Sonya gives her name, her maiden name Sosne and her birth year, 1920, and says her father was Volk. She contrasts her family's comfortable life with her husband's: a horse, a cow, a large courtyard, plenty of food and helping others. Her parents, a brother and the whole family were killed by the Germans in 1942; her father worked with horses, her mother Khane baked twice a week, and the whole family met on holidays.

Adds the Yiddish word for a teamster being asked and the killing site.

Sonya describes how her family baked matzo at home, with her old grandfather at the oven and the five children helping, and how the family waited for the father at the seder. The home was strictly kosher, and she learned cooking and baking from her mother.

Sonya explains how she makes sweet-and-sour meat and says that her great-grandchildren in kindergarten asked why the teachers did not cook like their grandmother.

Sonya describes how she makes gefilte fish, removing bones, chopping and adding onion, eggs, pepper and matzo meal. Kerler asks whether the fish is sweet or salted and what it is called, and she describes meat with plums and cookies with raisins. Everyone, including her great-grandchildren and a Christian son-in-law, loves her food. She then mentions the family's hard life today, her husband's invalid pension and small payments.

Adds the terminology questions about fish and the turn to pensions at the end.

Sonya briefly continues about pensions for war invalids and the president in Kyiv, and says that the amounts remain small.

Sonya says she studied for ten years in a Yiddish school, from beginning to end, before it was closed before the war. Lemster and Kerler ask about books, and the passage ends with talk of opening a window.

Adds that the school closed before the war.