The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

"The Last Day of Joy": Chernowitz in 1945

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Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman z"l, Yiddish poet and songwriter, remembers the exodus of Jews and her sense of foreboding when the Russians arrived in her hometown of Chernowitz following the Yalta Conference at the end of World War Two.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman.

This excerpt is in Yiddish.

Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman was born in Vienna, Austria in 1920. Beyle died in 2013.

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This interview is part of the Beyond the Books: Yiddish writers and their descendants Yiddish and the Arts: musicians, actors, and artists series.

Other video highlights from this oral history

Eliezer Shteynbarg Was Our Peretz

1 min 46 sec

I Began Writing To Entertain the Children: A Yiddish Writer's Inspiration

1 min 37 sec

Bainbridge Avenue: A Micro-neighborhood of Yiddish Culture in the Bronx

1 min 39 sec

Isaac Nachman Steinberg and the Frayland Lige (Freeland League)

2 min 13 sec

Yiddishism Is a Way of Life

1 min 25 sec

"It Gives Us a Reason, an Ideal": Yiddish in the Schaechter-Gottesman Family

2 min 9 sec

I Read Every Holocaust Memoir I Find

3 min 56 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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