Tag #151703 - Interview #78100 (Lazar Gurfinkel)

Romanian was the state language in Bessarabia from 1918, but Jews mostly spoke Yiddish or Russian. We spoke Russian at home. Sometimes my parents spoke Yiddish when they didn't want us to understand what they were discussing. We had a Ukrainian nanny. She was kind to me, and I was attached to her. I learned Ukrainian from her and Russian from my parents. I actually spoke a mixture of these two languages. I learned Yiddish when I was about 5 years old from the children I was playing with. We lived in a Jewish neighborhood, and all our neighbors were Jewish. I couldn't read or write in Yiddish, but I spoke it fluently.