Questionnaire session with Stotland, in which Katz and Kerler ask for Yiddish equivalents of Russian words and sentences. Items include verb forms and pronouns, words for a river, water well, potato, attic, butcher, shop and shopkeeper, and a toy top. Others cover expressions for the dead, numbers, fractions, and 'enemy' versus 'neighbour'. Stotland says which forms were used in Ovruch and which he does not know, and notes differences in villages near Belarus.
The catalogue says dialects are discussed; the transcript is mostly item-by-item elicitation with comments on regional differences.
Short passage with Kerler and Katz speaking about a house and its Jewish residents. They give a number of years, apparently eighty, and wish the occupants good health. The speakers are hard to follow, and the remarks concern language and the house rather than a clear tour.
Informal conversation with women at the Jewish community center in Ovruch. Katz mentions living in Vilnius and Kerler explains that the team records ethnography and language. They ask where the women learned Yiddish, and the women say it was from grandparents but that for years they did not speak it. The women mention relatives in Israel and some Hebrew learning.
Kerler asks who remembers prewar Jewish life. One woman says she was still a child before the war and went to Russian School No. 2, and her parents knew Yiddish.
The team asks for a Yiddish song and the women say they remember only fragments. They then answer Kerler's questions about prewar religious life, saying that there were several synagogues. After the war, Jews gathered secretly in a house to pray and the militia chased them away.
The transcript shows that a song was requested but mostly not performed.
Informal talk about the decline of Yiddish and the lack of people to speak it with. The women say they are now learning Hebrew. Katz suggests sending Yiddish newspapers from America and asks who might receive one.
Kerler asks about the synagogue in Ovruch, and the women say there was a large one, probably wooden. People from the surrounding villages came to study and pray there.
The women suggest possible interviewees, among them an old man called Binyomin (?) who is ninety-nine and still remembers how to pray, and a man named Friedman. They also mention a woman whose father was learned. They discuss ages and which people would speak Yiddish, and say that Ovruch was a Jewish town and that many Jews have since left or died.
One of the women tells an anecdote about a relative from the Crimea, a 'krimer eydem' (?), who spoke Yiddish when she assumed he was an invalid. They also discuss non-Jewish neighbors who understood Yiddish, such as the shoemaker and the tailor. The Yiddish they speak today is mixed with Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian. Katz mentions a Yiddish summer course in Vilnius.
Talk about life today and Yiddish among younger people. A woman says her parents were teachers, and children who emigrated to Israel quickly lose Russian. Kerler remarks on his friends and their languages. The passage is partly in Russian.
Start of the formal interview with Turovskaia, who talks about her work and observing Sabbath and holidays. She says she was born in Veledniki near the holy tsadik's grave. She gives her Yiddish and Russian names, her parents' and grandparents' names, her married name Turovskaia and maiden name Feldman, her address and telephone number. She was born in 1924, three days before Passover, and explains a custom connected with her birth.
The catalogue calls this holiday celebration; the transcript is mostly her names, her address and her birth date.
Turovskaia describes Veledniki as a very Jewish town where a holy tsadik is buried, giving his name (partly unclear) and that of his wife Ester Tsipe. She names her father after the tsadik and says he used to travel to pray at his grave. She also says she completed four grades of Yiddish school.
The transcript adds her father's pilgrimages to the tsadik's grave and that he was named after him.
Turovskaia talks about the Yiddish school in Veledniki, which she attended for four grades. She recalls the subjects, all taught in Yiddish. The school was closed in about 1935 or 1936, and she moved to a Ukrainian school and finished ten grades. She mentions that visitors still come to the tsadik's grave from Moscow, Leningrad and Siberia.
Turovskaia says 125 Jewish families lived in Veledniki, a town in a border zone that required a special permit to enter from Ovruch. She then begins on the start of the war: her father was taken into the army and her grandmother was very ill. Her mother had seven children, of whom four survived.
Turovskaia recounts in detail the evacuation of her family. Her grandmother was dying but urged the family to leave, and a teacher neighbor took Turovskaia to Kharkiv. The grandmother was carried to a wagon among pillows and taken to the station and by train toward Chernihiv. Turovskaia dug trenches, then received a telegram saying the family was at a kolkhoz in the Tambov region and traveled with Polish Jewish refugees. At the kolkhoz she found no one, and a woman from Ovruch helped her find her mother. The family later went on to Buryat Mongolia in Siberia. Her father fought at the front and returned in 1946. She describes the destruction of Veledniki when they returned, including the roofs taken by Hungarians.
Turovskaia talks about her parents. Her mother was born in 1899 or 1897 according to different records, and her father worked in trade, preparing livestock for sale. She praises her mother as a good housewife. She names a brother, Fayvl, who died, and says that seven children were born and four survived, because of a scarlet fever epidemic before the war.
