Balta, my grandpa's birthplace

From Moscow I took a 20 hour train ride to Balta, a town in the Odessa region of Ukraine where my grandfather happened to spend the first 10 years of his life. I had been invited by a group of graduate students from St. Petersburg Judaica Institute to join them on expedition. They would be interviewing the small community of Balta Jews, many of whose family's have been living in Balta for many generations, to learn as much as possible about the old customs, traditions, and ways of life of the shtetl Jews. Pictured below is most of the group in front of the high school dorm we stayed in. As you can see, the students were almost all female. I would say this week was the most intellectually stimulating of my whole time away and I'm really gratefull that I got to work with some interesting Russian graduate students. Only about half of the students were Jewish, which was really surprising to me since I had never before met ethnographers interested in Jewish life who weren't Jewish. My interview partner, though not Jewish at all, knew much more than me about Jewish traditions and holidays and she was even able to speak Yiddish to our informers. One night I even got to talking to one of the students about what I studied in college - domestication and evolution - which was fun but very challenging to do in Russian.Our first night in Balta we took a walk along the streets that would have been "the Jewish streets" pre-WWII and talked about how the Jewish houses were built. Pictured below is a house built in the style common for a Jewish home during the first half of the 20th century. It looked pretty runned down and abandoned. I imagined my grandfather growing up in one of these houses.
Balta was a chance for me to get in touch with the side of me that really loves small town/village life. I'm pictured below pulling water up from a well on the way back to base from an interview. We 'd do a few interviews each day and spend the rest of our time wandering around the town, drinking homemade wine from the market, swimming in the lake, and my favorite - picking delicious berries of all kinds from trees along the roads.The aforementioned lake is pictured below. Young boys are jumping off something that looks like a shipping crate from a freight train.In Balta there are one family houses right next to low apartment buildings, no more than 6 stories tall. These buildings are decorated with tile mosaics, as pictured below, something I didn't see in any other place on my trip.In the center of town there's this Lenin bust with a few amusement ride type things in front of it. After drinking some homemade wine with our lunchbox lunch one day my two interview partners thought it would be a great idea to get on this ride. I didn't feel so good afterwards.There is something about little ducklings that is irresistable to me. Most of you know that already. Below, a little Ukrainian boy holding a duckling I picked up from his family's yard and put in his hand, me holding a little duckling, and a woman at the market selling little chicks (not ducklings, but close enough).