Re: [Cz-L] Two Most Interesting Questions!

Dear Edgar,

1) The boundary between "lower" and "upper" districts roughly followed
the line of
Steingasse, Hauptstrasse, Schulgasse, St.-Nicolausgasse, and
Russische-gasse, with some pockets protruding from both directions.
The main evidence is architectural and demographic (your digitized
address books provide an excellent resource for the analysis of
distribution of occupations by street - thank you!)

2) The Austrian censuses notoriously did not recognized Yiddish as a
separate language, but the Romanian did, the last one was in 1930. I
don't have the numbers for Czernowitz, but for entire Bukovina the
number of people who spoke "mainly" Yiddish was 74,300 (8.7% of total
population, numbers from Enciclopedia Romaniei, Bd, 1, Bukarest 1938,
p. 152, as quoted by Lichtblau and John,
http://www.ibiblio.org/yiddish/Tshernovits/Lichtblau). This number
significantly underestimates the total number of speakers, because it
does not include those who indicated another language as the "main"
one. In my estimate, more than half of Czernowitz Jews spoke fluent
Yiddish in the 1930s.

Iosif

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 7:03 AM, Edgar Hauster <bconcept_at_hotmail.com> wrote:
> Czernowitzers...
>
> For some time past, I'm conducting a correspondence with Janina Wurbs, who participated in the research field studies in Moghilev-Podolski, organized by Petersburg Judaica in 2007 and 2008. I reported on this project in December 2010:
>
> http://hauster.blogspot.com/2010/12/mohyliv-podilskyi-ghetto.html
>
> Janina, who has got an impressive professional profile (http://de.linkedin.com/in/janinawurbs) raised two most interesting questions and I'm very curious about the reaction of our community:
>
> 1. Where was the delimitation between the so-called upper and the lower districts of Czernowitz?
>
> 2. What would be your estimate for the number of people, who spoke Yiddish in Czernowitz before WW2?
>
> Concerning the first question, I'd like - as an a appetizer - to quote a paragraph from the memoirs of my father, Julius Hauster:
>
> "Czernowitz is a city, located at the top of a hill, the Pruth is flowing in the valley below, where - in the lower districts of the city - the so-called orthodox, religious and impoverished Jews lived and where the major suburbs were located. We, the "sophisticated" and wealthier Jews lived in the upper town. My birth house, inherited from my maternal grandparents [Michel Fleischer, Fanni Fleischer {Ehrlich}], was on Ambrosgasse 7. Later on, I was about 14 years old [1926], my parents [Elias Hauster, Marjem Hauster {Fleischer}] sold this old house and acquired from the resulting proceeds two apartments, the first one on Althgasse (Str. Cuza Voda 7), the second one on Dreifaltigkeitsstrasse (Str. Sf. Treimi 37), both of them located at the third floor."
>
> Czernowitzers, let's demonstrate our "joint memory"!
>
> Edgar Hauster
> Lent - The Netherlands
>
> http://hauster.blogspot.com/

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Received on 2011-07-11 08:05:33