Interviewee Klara (Khaye) Naumovna Sapozhnik Recorded 27 May 2007, Tomashpol'
Kind synagogue
Related tapes MDV 701
Identifiers and copies
Tape MDV 700 · record
ff365t433 · Ukraine, Vinnytsya, Tomashpolʹ
Media Collections Online (Indiana University — the archival copy)
Not yet on YouTube or archive.org.
Cite this moment
Klara (Khaye) Naumovna Sapozhnik, interviewed by the AHEYM team, Tomashpol', 27 May 2007. AHEYM (Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories), Indiana University, tape MDV 700, at 0:00 . https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/ff365t433/section/gb19fw19v?t=0
Copy
Catalogue introduction
May 27, 2007. Ukraine, Vinnyts'ka Oblast', Tomashpol'. This tape begins with the research team en route to the home of Klara (Khaye) Naumovna Sapozhnik. (Part 1 of 2. See MDV 701) She sums up her current situation with the following words: “It’s a hard life and now it’s gotten even worse". Much of what Sapozhnik relates to the researchers is repeated information from her 2005 interview. Sapozhnik was born in 1924 in Tomashpol’ the same town, in which she has always lived even during the war years. Her youngest sibling Yidl/Yura currently lives in Ashdod, Israel and has severe health problems. The interviewee recalls the hardships of hunger and poverty in her youth, and the tragic deaths of her first husband and son in the postwar years. Both her parents worked in agriculture and with livestock on a half-Jewish kolkhoz called Gigant. At the time of this most recent interview, Sapozhnik lived in what she describes as an old Jewish home, complete with old mezuzahs, near where a synagogue used to be. Sapozhnik shares information about her sisters, among whom are Dvoyre (b. 1916), Sure (b. 1917, she moved to the Far East) and Zina (who moved to Moscow in the 1930s). The interviewee remembers various traditional foods served on shabes (Sabbath) and shares family fish recipes. Sapozhnik attempts to describe the Yiddish schools that were once in the town, but notes that she herself never had any schooling because her family lived on a kolkhoz; she therefore remains illiterate. Sapozhnik returns to the war years, further detailing what it was like in the Tomashpol’ ghetto, and how the Jews who had been sent to the town from Bessarabia were killed. Sapozhnik takes great pride in her garden and tells the interviewers about her crops, including flowers, potatoes, onions and seabuckthorn, the latter of which she makes into an oil that she is able to sell. Before he died, her husband used to make wine from their grapes. Towards the end of the tape, Sapozhnik tells the interviewers how after the war there were very few Jewish young men in the town as the majority had been killed in the war. Her mother knew and practiced folk remedies, such as the usage of bankes (cupping), a traditional form of healing.
From the machine transcript
Video interview recorded on 27 May 2007 in Tomashpol', Vinnytsia oblast, with Klara (Khaye) Sapozhnik, born in Tomashpol' in 1924 (the birth year is stated in the interview). The tape opens with the research team driving through town, with Russian and Yiddish talk among the team and local companions. The main part is an interview, mostly with Kerler and Lemster, in Sapozhnik's yard. It covers her loneliness and hardship today, her parents and siblings, the kolkhoz, the war-time ghetto, Sabbath and Hanukkah food, the Yiddish school, her garden, and her mother's folk healing, including cupping.
Speakers, as the transcript identifies them
Klara (Khaye) Naumovna Sapozhnik informant Dov-Ber Kerler interviewer Moisei Lemster interviewer S2 other S3 other Languages heard
Yiddish 47.5 min; Russian 2.3 min
Where catalogue and transcript differ The first passage is mostly Russian talk in the car, with the recogniser producing gibberish Yiddish, so its content is partly guessed. The informant's speech is often garbled; birth and marriage years are partly uncertain, and the catalogue's 2005 repetition note cannot be checked. The informant's name is also given as Yudkovitsh (her father's surname) in the transcript. The catalogue summary places her sisters and the Gigant kolkhoz; the transcript gives the kolkhoz name as Gigant at 20:26.
A paraphrase of a machine reading: the topics can be trusted; names, numbers and family relations are to be heard before they are cited. How this layer was made.
