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

[Linda Knox]

Perhaps it's a version of this song in Ukrainian.
Пісня, на музику якої була написана "Крутітся, вєртітся шар голубой":
Де ж тая вулиця, де ж той дім,
де ж тая дівчина, що я любив,
де ж тії кучері, щом чесав, 
да ж тії устоньки, щом цілував.


 

Pasted from <http://www.tereveni.org.ua/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t6997.html> 

 
> Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:34:23 -0500
> From: lloannna at GMAIL.COM
> Subject: [SEELANGS] "Where is the house, and where is the street"
> To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
> 
> 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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