Interview

Evgeniia Kozak was born in 1926 in Bershad. She attended a Ukrainian school for eight years. Her parents, who were cousins, were both born in Bershad. Her father was a furrier. She had a younger brother and sister. She survived the war in evacuation in Bezopasnik, Orlovsky Region in the Caucasus and then in Andizhanskaia in the Stalinska region in Central Asia. When she returned to Bershad after the war, in April 1944, her mother worked as a baker. She married in 1958 and has two sons. Her husband died before her second son was born, when her first son was just one and a half years old.


Other Interviews:

Stuffed Neck with Chicken Fat
Food on Sabbath
Postwar Charity
Evgeniia's Gefilte Fish

A Pair of Shoes

Bershad, Ukraine

The Jews of the Podolian shtetls remember the 1920s and 1930s as a time of great need and want, but they also recognize that within this period there was a sense of community and mutual aid. Many recall their fellow Jews sharing food and helping out. At least in the early 1920s, they claim, the community was close-knit and neighbors helped one another.

Many Yiddish songs that shtetl Jews sang in this period bemoaned the poverty of the shtetl. The same melancholy phrases and idioms of poverty recur in numerous songs. Young orphan children are always wandering through the dark and cold streets of the shtetl barefoot, dreaming only of a pair of shoes, for which they would pawn their last shirt. Evgeniia Kozak, who grew up in Bershad in the 1920s, sung several songs for us incorporating these themes. One, in particular, weaved them all together in a lament of poverty, want, and destitution:



In droysn iz finster un nas un kalt
Ikh hob shoyn nit keyn shikhelekh.
Aroystsugeyn in gas.
Ven mayn oreme muter volt atsind gelebt
Zi volt farzetst dos letste hemd.

Arayn in tifn noyt.
Un volt far ir yoseml a por shikhelekh gekoyft.
Der lerer fun der shul zogt ikh bin a kind, a brilyant
Un ale raykhe yingelekh lakhn fun mayn shand.
Azoy iz avekgon tsvelef yor derkhanand
Un fun dem oremen yosem iz gevorn...

Di oreme muter hot farzetst dos letste hemd
Un hot far dem yoseml a por shikhelekh gekoyft.
Azoy iz avekgon tsvelef yor derkhanand
Er zitst in tsimer un drikt im di hant.
Tsi gedenkstu shoyn tatenyu tsurik mit tsvelef yor
Ven du host mir gekoyft shikhelekh a por?
Un derfar vos du host mir gekoyft shikhelekh a por
Vel ikh dikh gliklekh makhn ale dayne yor.
Outside it’s dark, and wet, and cold.
And I have no shoes,
To go out on the street.
If my poor mother were still alive,
She would pawn her last shirt.
Never mind her extreme need,


And would buy a pair of shoes for her little orphan.
My school teacher says I am a precious child,
And all the rich children laugh at my shame.
So twelve years passed,
And since then this poor orphan has become...


My poor mother has pawned her last shirt,
And bought her orphan a pair of shoes.
So, twelve years have passed,
He sits in his room and wrings his hands,
Do you still remember your son after twelve years?
When you bought me a pair of shoes?
And because you bought me that pair of shoes,
I will make you happy for all your years.




Source: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2013)