Maria Yakuta was born in 1921 in Teplyk. She grew up with six siblings. Her parents were also born in Teplyk, and her father worked as a hatmaker. She attended a Yiddish school for seven years. Her parents and three siblings were killed in Teplyk during the war.
Other Interviews:
"Der Shtern"Peeking into the Men's Section
The Matzo Bag
"and a goat on a chain"
Eating Sour Mash - the Great Hunger
Sanctification of the Moon
The Binding of Isaac
Teplyk, Ukraine
Women were generally unable to acquire a formal Jewish education. Many, like Maria Yakuta, derived their faith and religious identity from biblical stories, which they knew from the Tsene Urene, a popular Yiddish retelling of the Bible. In the spirit of midrash, the book incorporates a variety of non-canonical stories about biblical characters, and explicitly derives moral lessons from the stories. Although the original text dates to the sixteenth-century, versions circulating in the modern period were written in a conversational style, and so were widely accessible. The Tsene Urene was one of the most popular of Jewish writings in the Ashkenazi world well into the twentieth-century. In this clip, Yakuta recalls how her mother would read aloud from the text. Interestingly, the names and life stories of the biblical patriarchs had receded from her memory, but the lessons remained relevant to her daily life. In this clip, she summarizes what it means to be a Jew by telling us the story of Akeydes Yitskhok (the near-sacrifice of Isaac), but she can not recall the names of Abraham or Isaac or even the origins of the story: Yakuta didn’t treat this central story in the Bible as part of a textual tradition, but rather viewed it as an element of folk wisdom. Like many women, and men as well, she knew her biblical stories not from reading the Pentateuch, but rather from retellings of the stories designed to emphasize their moral lessons.