"Where is the house, ..Evening Chimes

[Olga Dobrunova]

The second song is "Vechernii zvon". Lyrics -  http://www.karaoke.ru/song/674.htm
if you decide to sing it some day :) 



________________________________
From: Sarah Marie Parker-Allen <lloannna at GMAIL.COM>
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Sent: Fri, November 13, 2009 8:34:23 PM
Subject: [SEELANGS] "Where is the house, and where is the street"

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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