The team meets on the street and drives with him to the town center. The first brief part of the recording includes an informal chat with an unidentified man, recorded in Bershad. The team meets on the street and drives with him to the town center.
Street scene in Bershad' with two or three local people, mostly in Russian. They sort out where to meet, mention someone's closed-up house and a phone call that did not get through, and head off by car. Kerler asks in Russian whether Jews lived here before the war, and the answer is that many did. The speech is largely garbled.
The transcript is mostly arrangements and who lived where, with Kerler's question about prewar Jews.
The second part of the tape is a formal interview with Sima (Sima Ilinichna) Moiseyevna Listengurt in the town center of Odesa. She was born 1932 in Odesa. The team meets Listengurt on the street and sets up an interview with her. She talks about her life during the war. She evacuated to 01:58 Siberia. She then talks about her family. She then gives a tour of homes of well-known Jewish figures, including Hayim Nahman Bialik. She also talks about prewar Jewish life and continues showing buildings of the former Jewish neighborhood.
Listengurt is introduced and objects to being photographed. She says that during evacuation, Bessarabian Jews were with them in the Kustanay region. She points out the courtyard of her childhood, where Jews lived in prerevolutionary times. She mentions a shoemaker's family and a visiting relative, the Kaganovich family (?), and her family's fear of speaking freely. Lemster is introduced as a history professor. She then shows where Hayim Nahman Bialik is said to have lived and the former homes of the Kataev brothers. She talks about Jewish life before the war, with Jews making up most of the district. The discussion also covers a sister's acquaintance who emigrated to Palestine, with Kerler working out the name of an Israeli leader (Shkolnik?). She ends on the Stalin-era buildings, high ceilings and good housing.
The transcript adds the Kustanay evacuation, the Kataev brothers and a sister's acquaintance who emigrated to Palestine.
Listengurt talks about her childhood memories, living with other nationalities in one building. She then addresses her family. Her father was born in Voznesensk and her mother in Lyakhova. Her parents were both orphans and moved to Odesa in 1921. She grew up with an older sister who was a nurse at the front. Listengurt evacuated to Tashkent during the war. Listengurt continues the tour of the former Jewish neighborhood, explaining former buildings, including a tuberculosis treatment center and a Yiddish school. Listengurt also addresses her uncles’ encounter with Felix Dzerzhinsky in 1920.
Lemster asks about her parents and about her Yiddish. She says they spoke it, and describes the courtyard as full of Jews with a few Christian neighbours. Her father came from Voznesensk and her mother from Lyakhova (?). They were orphans who married in the early 1920s and settled in the city, and an older sister served in the war. She was born in 1932 and says she was in evacuation. She says few people still speak Yiddish and offers to introduce two or three Jewish acquaintances. Walking through the quarter, she shows a tuberculosis institute and children's sanatorium, streets and an artists' building. She describes a school with mostly Jewish teachers, where her sister studied, and a Yiddish school that existed until the 1930s. She also tells how a sister called her a Zionist. Her uncles Misha and Rafe, tailors, met Dzerzhinsky in 1920 and were later arrested; she mentions Yezhov and Beria in this connection.
Adds her remarks on who still speaks Yiddish, the Yiddish school, her sister's naming her a Zionist, and the uncles' arrests.
The tour continues. Listengurt names the streets in the former Jewish quarter and mentions a park and a poet, speaking about language and the shift of the word 'Jew' (zhid, Hebrew). She points to a former prerevolutionary building and the rabbi's flat (the rabbi had five or six children). She remembers going to the synagogue at Yom Tov and Yom Kippur, with two synagogues and many orphans there, taught trades. She also talks about the first rabbi who came to Odesa and who blamed the Jews themselves. The recording is interrupted by suggestions to sit somewhere quieter. A remark about the Jewish tree (?) and a request addressed to Lemster in Russian are also heard.
The transcript adds the rabbi's family and the first rabbi in Odesa.
The formal part of the interview begins. Listengurt talks about different periods of Jewish history in Odesa and party politics. She then talks about her family, in particular her sister.
Kerler explains the interview, and Listengurt settles in to speak. She speaks about the early Jewish settlement of Odesa and its large prewar Jewish population (a majority). She tells how the Germans and Romanians took the city in 1941 and how long Odesa held out, and she recalls a Jewish history teacher and her own challenge to antisemites. She says Stalin was good to the Jews and names local figures such as the party secretary Naum Gurevich and General Petrov. She also tells of her father, who worked in the port and was a Communist, and of the early days of the war. Her father was nearly blind and ended up in Tashkent. Her older sister served at the front for the whole war, was a medical-institute student and afterwards a nurse (?). She also discusses catacombs and local building stone.
The transcript adds Odesa's early Jewish history, the defence of Odesa, her father's war role and her sister's army service.
