"Where is the house, and where is the street"

[Sarah Marie Parker-Allen]

Hello, all. I can't think of where else to ask this. Thanks in advance 
to any replies!

In 1982, my paternal grandfather (born in NY in 1912, raised in a 
Yiddish-speaking household whose adult members listed themselves on the 
1910 census as being from "Russia," but his parents were in fact born in 
Jonava, Lithuania) recorded an album of songs he and his comrades sang 
while he was in one of Franco's prison camps during the Spanish Civil 
War. Snippets can be heard for free on the Smithsonian website:

http://www.folkways.si.edu/TrackDetails.aspx?itemid=17841

Two of the recordings are in Russian. One of them, listed as number 211 
under the name "Evening Chimes," is too much of a challenge for me to 
understand with my year and a half of undergraduate Russian studies. 
I've been trying to sort out the story behind the other one - track 
number 112, "Where is the House." You can actually hear the entire 
Russian portion of the track by clicking on the little play icon next to 
the track name. I like this one mainly because I understood all but two 
words after about the fifth week of Russian 101.

The translation my grandfather gives immediately afterwards and in the 
liner notes is "Where is the house, and where is the street, and where 
is the girl that I used to meet?" The only references I'm finding online 
are to a very similar song in French (with a little boy) and a mention 
on this page:

http://bibliotekar.ru/encSlov/3/165.htm

Which is problematic in that it seems to me that it is talking about 
romantic themes in the Stalinist era, and either my grandfather was 
remembering it wrong (he says in the recording that this is a song he 
learned as a lullaby from his mother,) or the last word is different. 
And there's no explanation of where the song comes from, which is what 
I'd really like to know. Googling the phrase "Где эта улица? Где этот 
дом?" turns up all manner of stuff that doesn't include the rest of the 
song, suggesting it's a common reference. I think.

So, that's what I've got. Is this some random snippet from a larger 
work? Is it just a random song fragment that children (and their 
parents) sing? Did grandpa replace the "b" sound with "g"?

I'm the only living person in the family who can form a coherent 
sentence in Russian, I'm not that good at it, and all of the project 
notes are lost (and half a continent away from me anyhow,) so I have no 
other source to go to at this point. Help, please!

I believe you can get the liner notes for free on the Smithsonian page, 
incidentally (the Russian stuff is transliterated: it looks to me like 
the notes were typed and then photocopied, and I imagine Cyrillic 
typewriters were in short supply in Glendale in 1982.) If anyone wants 
to take a stab at identifying the chime song, that'd be great, too; I 
just know it's beyond me right now.

-- 
Sarah Marie Parker-Allen

parker-allen.1 at osu.edu
http://www.smp-a.com

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