MDV 606 · Mendel Idlovich Trachtenberg

Trachtenberg answers Kerler's dialectological questionnaire, giving Yiddish equivalents for Russian prompts. The items cover greetings and times of day, illness, honesty and the words for Christian, gentile, church, cross and Muslim, and everyday words (potato, flowers, vodka, a thousand, grandmother and midwife). They also cover numbers, prepositions and conjunctions, sentence translations, parts of the house and the words for man, woman and person. During the elicitation he mentions fleeing from the Germans and being caught, and the three or four Jews still left who know Yiddish. He lists the languages spoken in Novoselytsya (Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, Moldovan and Romanian), and Kerler also asks about the synagogue cantor's place.

Includes Trachtenberg's remarks on fleeing the Germans, on the few Yiddish speakers left, and on the languages spoken in Novoselytsya.

Kerler and Trachtenberg arrange a visit to the former synagogue (the kloyz or shul) and the old Jewish part of town. Trachtenberg says he will show the building, which is now a sports hall, and that its interior has Yiddish inscriptions. He says he cannot go in for a day, and they discuss looking in through the windows.