A Krimchak Memoirs of the Russo-Japanese War

This paper describes a unique memoir written by a soldier about his experiences during the Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905. The memoir is written in the Krimchak ethnolect of Crimean Tatar using Hebrew letters. This memoir changes our notion about the Krimchaks as a group of quiet, religious people, indifferent to their surroundings. The memoir’s author, Menahem Berman, appears as a person who takes an active part in different historical events of his stormy life, both in peacetime in Odessa before the war and after he was called up and during his journey through Siberia to fight in the war. He describes life in field conditions during the war in Manchuria and his life after the war in captivity in Japan. He is an observant man, taking notice of all that is around him and recording all the details and his impression of them. In this paper the content of the memoir will be discussed, and the quality of the manuscript is described. In a linguistical overview, the Krimchak ethnolect used in the memoir is shown to have an Oghuz grammatical form prevailing over the Kypchak form, and hence the ethnolect can be regarded as a patois of the basic southern dialect of Crimean Tatar. This paper also presents 100 initial sentences of the text in transcription and with translation and glossary

Memoir · Political science · History · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Law