Don’t worry, I don’t plan on starting a podcast! But I did want to share this conversation between A.I. Polan—the first of our family to emigrate to the US, and my great-grandfather’s oldest brother—and his family from March of 1958. This is full of very useful information for my research, but what I *really* love is the way his accent is a blend of the lilting tones of Appalachian dialect and the Eastern European Yiddish speaker’s fricatives where a native English speaker would have labio-velar approximants. (Fancy English professor way of saying he pronounces his Ws like Vs.)
If you have old recordings of relatives, even if you can’t imagine that anyone would be interested in them, I implore you to digitize and archive them. This recording is invaluable to me as a researcher, but it’s even more meaningful to me as a person asking questions about who I am as an American and an Appalachian, and getting to hear the voice of the person who brought us here. I’m grateful to my cousins Ronald and Martha for making this available.
A.I. Polan with children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren in March, 1958 (audio)