Recordings › Tomashpol'

MDV 704 · Evgeniia Toyvovna Shusterman

Tomashpol', Ukraine 28 May 2007 35 min · 2 passages
This tape is not yet on the project's channels.
Watch it on Media Collections Online — the time links below open the player there at the right moment.
Passages

0:00

Interview with Evgeniia Toyvovna Shusterman.

· MCO
From the machine transcript

After opening chat among those present, Shusterman gives her father Toyva's name and says he was born in Tomashpol' in 1901 and died in 1995 aged 94. He worked in several jobs, including at a bank, and wrote well in Yiddish and Russian. She describes him as an honest and pious man who prayed daily and led the Passover seder. After the war he acted as a kind of rebbe, saying kaddish for the dead, and the militia broke up prayer gatherings. She says she cannot tell about Jewish life before the war and then talks about his singing and her own love of music. She talks about her own accounting career, leaving work at 53 to care for her blind father, and then knitting and selling at the market. She also covers her own illness and depression. The few Jews left in Tomashpol' (eight) gather for holidays and yortsaytn, and she explains why she will not emigrate and a relative in Germany. She says antisemitism was present earlier, and she describes her wartime evacuation to Mordovia and the postwar housing and compensation. She also talks about her husband, a non-Jew, and a lost love from Odesa. The passage ends with Kerler's thanks, a promise to send Yiddish songs, and fragmentary talk.

Covers her father's death and the Kerler/Lemster promise of Yiddish songs, her marriage, and her wartime evacuation.

33:40

Footage of houses in an unidentified town.

Footage · MCO