The only Jewish tradition we observed was that my mother and father lit a candle on Friday evening, but we didn’t even have a kosher meal. There was no shochet so how could there be kosher meat?
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Displaying 19441 - 19470 of 50826 results
Egon Lovith
I was a bigger boy by then, but nevertheless, the neighbor Indian woman still looked after us. On the afternoons when I wasn’t in school my dear little sister and I spent time at different neighbors, or we were staring at things, had a chat. I was supposed to take care of my sister. Irenke was very attached to me, she was always by my side and we were very close. She was a very funny and sweet girl.
That was our last home in Mexico, where my sister, Irenke, was born in 1932. She only learned speaking in Hungarian because we only spoke Hungarian at home. My sister knew only a little Spanish, she attended kindergarten for a quarter or half a year, and she knew only what she picked up from the Indian kids. However, the two of us would usually stay at home where we didn’t have anyone to speak Spanish with.
Next to our house there were very modest Mexican-Indian clay houses. That is where we rented a house. An Indian rented his brick house to us while he lived near us in a wattle house. He did a lot of work around our house for us. By that time we had our own yard, just as if we were living in the countryside. We had a lockable gate and door, but anyone could easily jump the fence.
My father became ill and it led to the complete financial break down of my family. He couldn’t keep up with his work and in 1932, we moved out from downtown to past the suburbs. I took the tram and if I recall correctly, after the last tram stop it was another 25-30-minute walk to our house. Later on I traveled by myself. There were no canals and the water ran through ditches, just like in villages. At the station where I got off, at the beginning of the road people were selling lard and tortilla in a tent.
My father bought Spanish books but we still spoke Hungarian at home. I finished elementary school in Spanish, and I had five years at Saint Louis de Palestrina, the best Spanish Catholic middle school, where we only learned about the Middle Ages in our history classes.
My father bought an old Ford under the counter. When the three of us sat in the car we looked like the people in Stan and Bran films. My dad was very good at keeping the Ford in good condition, he even had to crank its handle. If I’m correct the tires of the car weren’t even inflatable, they were still the solid tires. While my dad was still well he would take my mother and I for car rides and we drove around Mexico. We would drive as far as 70, 80 or 100 kilometers. We mostly explored the Aztec land. My father wanted to show us where and what he had done besides watch making in his first two years while he was waiting for my mother and I. Besides his passion for watches, my dad had a passion for archeology.
While we were already living there, the time of the elections came. I know that my father put me onto his shoulders – which means that I must have been about five years old, so it must have been in 1928 – and we arrived to a big open square in Mexico City, the capital. There was an enormous crowd. The Indians came from the countryside; there were so many people in sombreros, supposedly one million people on the square. The result of the election was announced on speakers, but the microphone was so bad, we couldn’t understand anything. Than came Alvaro, the president, a brown-skinned, gray-haired man with Native American origins, who announced that he had been elected. This was Mexico’s first democratic election in which someone of Mexican-Indian origin was elected. Up until then the presidents were Spanish dictators. My father wasn’t particularly tall so he couldn’t really see much, so sitting on his shoulders I was telling him what was happening. Then all of a sudden I heard a gun or a pistol shot and I could see the new president falling to the ground. There was a huge mess, everybody took his pistol out and there was shooting everywhere. My dad and I could hardy get out in one piece. So, as a five-year-old kid I was already an eyewitness of an assassination.
In the Hungarian club my parents met with a tailor couple, their name might have been Elekes, who didn’t have any children. They had a very good tailor business and their own tailor’s shop. We became really good friends with the Elekes and we would often go hiking together on Sundays and my family would bring food for brunch. Mrs. Elekes was a fine, sturdy woman.
Somehow word spread that there was a club for Hungarian emigrants in Mexico City, where this group of Hungarians would come together. They even asked for registration and a member’s fee and then you could go for a drink and play cards, play bridge. It was in a very nice and clean restaurant, which was filled with Hungarian voices. The band was either taught or they learned it from somewhere but they played Hungarian gypsy music. My mother knew the songs really well and sometimes she would sing along with the band. One could even eat, the restaurant offered Hungarian-style dishes. The regular members were well fed with red cheeks. It was a big party with lots of food and drinks. It had a truly Hungarian vibrating atmosphere. Since my mother was missing Hungarian company it was mostly she, who went to the Hungarian club. After his work, my father went to the club after her and they came home together.
Elias Gopas had two kids. I think they both had red hair, pale skin and weren’t too tall. Elias himself was also a stocky, middle height person, and he always wore his shirt unbuttoned, breathed very heavily and walked powerfully. When there was a tub or a pile of dung had to be moved that the poor Indians were struggling with, Elias grabbed them firmly and moved them with incredible strength. They celebrated Sabbath and the holidays. While my father was alone in Mexico, the Gopas family invited him for Sabbath so he wouldn’t be alone and he could keep his Jewish identity. On Sabbath I imagine they ate together and they would also discuss things about Jewish life and Russian–Polish relations. There were certainly heavy political discussions and they surely analyzed the whole situation of tsarist Russia.
My father met a wealthy Polish Jew in the capital, who had also emigrated to Mexico. His name was Elias Gopas, he was a skilful businessman and became so incredibly rich that he had cowherds on the border of the Mexican capital and he also owned a milk refinery. He produced butter and sour cream as well. This Polish man must have been a very talented fellow and he had Mexican Indians working for him. He took his watch to my father once; that’s how they met and they kept in touch afterwards. We started to regularly visit them and I spent a lot of time at his place.
When my father’s business started going better we could afford to move into a better place. However, we never lived in a separate courtyard. I know that once we lived on Meave Street in an apartment that had two windows looking onto the street. It was a big thing since most of the houses were concrete apartments, the floors were arranged in a circle, with bars, and the doors and windows all opened inwards toward the big courtyard. There were huge yards where the tenants dealt with all of their issues as well as all celebrations and holidays. There was a celebration for children, when the entire house was staring at them [as they were performing something], and then they commented how the children performed. You could go through the floor and find every door open. You could smell what everyone was cooking all the time and you could also yell into the apartments saying, ‘Senora como esta? Bien, gracias’. [How are you Madame? Well, thank you.] They talked back and forth and we always knew who lived well, who lived poorly, who lived under bad conditions, who had fights; there were no secrets. My mother didn’t work, so together we, nicely dressed, we would wait for my father for lunch, or visit him at his store or go shopping. We only ate out in restaurants on Sundays.
In my family it was mostly my grandmother who was engaged in politics. We didn’t have a radio, therefore I had to bring a Hungarian newspaper, the Jo Estet [Good Evening], for my grandmother along with the bread and milk. The paper didn’t have any specific Jewish content and was a politically mixed paper, mostly for the Hungarian middle class. It had a cultural section with theater and cinema commentaries and even book reviews. The paper also had political articles and my grandmother always analyzed and commented on them. These articles were the forerunner of the coming changes. The Hungarian papers were careful of what they wrote about. Everything I knew I heard from the adults in my family. It was Hari, my grandmother, mother and Jeno who discussed these things. I only listened to them but I wasn’t involved in politics and cared only for art. I wasn’t really interested in any of the things they talked about.
My family wasn’t too happy and was calmly skeptical about Horthy’s [12] entry. They saw in them the returning Hungarian gentry class. We weren’t at all expecting that our situation would improve just because the Hungarians said ‘Sweet Transylvania, we are here again…’. Some Jews were hoping that they would get back the positions that they had lost under the Romanians.
Soon my mother talked to uncle Hari and I was transferred to a big horse carriage to be an assistant transport worker, although they didn’t really want me there because I was too skinny. They knew that they had to lift and carry things over 100 kilos and two men had to be able to carry a piano. In the end Mozsi, a Hungarian man, was the only person who was willing to work with me. I heard what people said to him, ‘You got the Jew for yourself, you will suffer the consequences.’ But this was just cocky talk and there was no anti-Semitism at the Union. Mozsi taught me well how to grip and lift things skillfully. Our carriage had two horses and we had to carry mostly coal, wheat, and packages, things that came on the train. I only stayed at the Union for a couple of months because the company reduced the number of Jewish employees and mostly kept the stronger men. After that came the Hungarian era.
There were two large transportation companies in Kolozsvar, one of them having a nice Jewish name, perhaps Goldstein, and the other one was the Union. I got a job at the Union, which was by the train station. My uncle Hari worked there as chief bookkeeper because he had graduated from the school of economics. The owner was a Jewish man. They hired me as a transport worker. I had to carry 28-30-kilo wooden boxes, on foot, on my shoulders, to the post office, send it and take the receipt back to the Union. It was a short trip from the station to the post office, but carrying such heavy boxes wasn’t an easy and comfortable thing and I wasn’t fit enough to do that. I was silently doing my job and bore the pain of my shoulders, so everybody at home felt so sorry for me, that they almost cried, when they saw me, their child, what I looked like. But there was nothing to help the situation with, because that was the job.
Perhaps on the same night or early the next morning, the baroness talked to Mr. Glantz, because when he came to the store around 8 or 9am on the next day, he ordered me into his office immediately. He said to me, ‘Listen to me, I know your family origins, I know you have been to Mexico, etc., but I will fire you without your foot touching the store’s ground ever again! You have no right to insult a customer, you have to swallow whatever a customer says and you can think whatever you want but you can’t show it.’ I didn’t ask Mr. Glantz why or anything, I just waited in silence for him to be done. I wasn’t fired right away but I was as soon as the next numerus clausus was enacted and the number of Jewish employees had to be reduced at least by one or two. That was in 1939.
I had a conflict with a baroness once. She couldn’t make up her mind in the store, so eight to ten pairs of shoes had to be delivered to her house, somewhere on Gyulai Pal Street. It was quite late in the evening, around 8 or 9pm, by the time I got there. It was a pretty villa with a garden, and they were having dinner in the terrace. Upon my arrival I rang the bell and somebody opened the gate and told me to come back once more because the baroness wasn’t going to see me right then. I would have had to take all the shoes home and I didn’t want to do go through all the filthy, smelly and dark streets. Then someone spoke up from the terrace and told me to wait. I stood next to the gate because there was nowhere to sit down. I caught them at the beginning of their meal and while they ate their dinner, drank their wine and tea, I stood by the gate in the cold, with ten pairs of shoes for an hour and a half. I was pretty annoyed because it was late already and this was my last errand.
Finally, when everyone had left the table, the baroness signaled that I could come in. She tried on all the shoes and decided to keep three or four so I was left with five pairs. By that time I was really fed up because I couldn’t stand the indignity of the way I was treated; how they made me wait by the gate, as a miserable servant, and wouldn’t even give me a chair to sit on. After all, based on my upbringing, I considered myself a gentleman. Then the baroness took some money out and gave it to me like it was a pittance. I looked at the amount and it was as much as I made in three days if not in a whole week. But I was a self-respecting ‘gentle’ boy – that’s what I said when I was young, if I didn’t like or want something – I thanked her and said, ‘I don’t accept tips’. ‘What?’ was all she could say. I said goodbye, it’s true that not very humbly, not very nicely, and not backwards, but turned my back on her and went out the gate. I took the remaining shoeboxes home. At home I told everyone that I didn’t accept the tip the baroness had offered. The family agreed with me with mixed feelings; they wouldn’t have minded if I had had some money in my hands so we could have bought some bread. Pride costs money, damn it.
Finally, when everyone had left the table, the baroness signaled that I could come in. She tried on all the shoes and decided to keep three or four so I was left with five pairs. By that time I was really fed up because I couldn’t stand the indignity of the way I was treated; how they made me wait by the gate, as a miserable servant, and wouldn’t even give me a chair to sit on. After all, based on my upbringing, I considered myself a gentleman. Then the baroness took some money out and gave it to me like it was a pittance. I looked at the amount and it was as much as I made in three days if not in a whole week. But I was a self-respecting ‘gentle’ boy – that’s what I said when I was young, if I didn’t like or want something – I thanked her and said, ‘I don’t accept tips’. ‘What?’ was all she could say. I said goodbye, it’s true that not very humbly, not very nicely, and not backwards, but turned my back on her and went out the gate. I took the remaining shoeboxes home. At home I told everyone that I didn’t accept the tip the baroness had offered. The family agreed with me with mixed feelings; they wouldn’t have minded if I had had some money in my hands so we could have bought some bread. Pride costs money, damn it.
Romania
My task was to keep the store clean. Originally sweeping the walkway and getting rid of any rubbish were the tasks of the two Hungarian janitors but eventually it became my job. They left all the dirty work for me. I had to clean up all the rubbish left by the person who arranged the store window and got rid off the rubbish that the customers left. I also had to carry shoeboxes, at times eight to ten at once, up and down from the basement because that is where they stored the shoes. My most difficult task was that every single evening at seven o’clock, after I cleaned up and the store closed, I had to deliver the shoes that the customers ordered to their homes on that day, since our store was an elite place, only the wealthy shopped there. Then I got the shoeboxes, which were tied around together or I had to tie them myself and the addresses were on them. I also got a note telling me to whom I had to deliver the shoes. I walked about six to seven kilometers with the shoeboxes. In general I had to deliver to two customers an evening and three if they lived close to one another. Once I arrived at the given address, I rang the bell and they were expecting me, because they had said before when they wanted me to go there. I gave the shoes to the customers, and some did, others didn’t give me a tip for the delivery. They went to the store afterwards to pay for the shoes. Once I was done with the deliveries I had to go down to the train station because that’s where I lived. Needless to say, wealthy people didn’t live close to the station, and the poor people who did wouldn’t order a shoe delivery.
Romania
My immediate boss, Mr. Glantz, was extremely reserved. He always smelled and along with his sweat he was an ugly aristocratic Jew. There was also a Hungarian chief bookkeeper woman who was always busy putting on make-up. Among the shop assistants there was a Romanian, a Hungarian and the five others were Jewish. Besides this, there were two janitors in the store, two simple Hungarians who were very nice and I got along well with both of them. They kept the store keys and they had to be at the store and open it by six o’clock in the morning when I got there.
In 1939, still under the Romanian era, during the reign of Carol II [11], when I finished high school I had to look for work to earn some money because my family couldn’t afford to pay for my higher education. I had to look for a job and the possibilities were sad. I worked for a plumber carrying his bag and I dug holes. Then I was hired at the shoe store of Ignac Farkas as an errand boy. This was the most elegant and most famous shoe store, the Herbach Dermata’s retail store, where we sold Dermata shoes exclusively. Ignac Farkas was the co-owner of Dermata.
The end result wasn’t given immediately and it read as follows, ‘Decision: after the examination of the youngster’s abilities the committee concluded that he is qualified for gardening and basket weaving’. So, I was allowed to weave baskets and do the gardening. It is absolutely certain that they didn’t give qualification based on the intelligence scores. I found myself among a bunch of underclass kids – I, who belonged to the intelligentsia with my Mexican schooling, language proficiency, and good upbringing. It’s evident that the scores were determined in favor of the Romanian kids while the non-Romanians were denied the possibility of better jobs. My qualification exam results didn’t guarantee a job for me. I had to go to a company and ask for my spot. My mother got really upset when the result of my qualification exam arrived.
At the end of 1938 there was a qualifying examination at the Institutul Regele Carol al II. [Editor’s note: King Charles II Institute was the successor of the Franz Joseph University in the interwar period; today it is called Babes-Bolyai University.] I was told that without a qualifying examination I wouldn’t be able to find a job. The exam was necessary for any non-specialized jobs and for specialized jobs besides this exam, it was also required to prove one’s vocational schooling. The qualifying examination was available for anybody but in reality it was a hidden form of numerus clausus in Romania [10]. It wasn’t stated that a person of a given ethnic background wasn’t allowed to work, but they rather said that the person needed to prove he was qualified. At the examination there were tests that had nothing to do with anything. First there was the medical examination; blood tests, throat, teeth and other check-ups. I was a skinny but strong kid. I remember a bunch of intelligence tests: there were math problems and logic problem sets. I was excellent at the observation and logic tests. They gave some sort of tricky pictures and I had to complete them. They showed the original complete pictures for a moment and I had to remember what the details were. There was also another test where they showed me a picture for a short time and then took it away and afterwards gave me a piece of paper and I had to complete whatever parts of the original picture were missing. For instance I saw a bear walking in the snow but the footprints were missing. And there were other things missing as well that I had to finish. I must have gotten a high score for noticing so many missing details.
There was a Jewish emigration wave in Romania in 1939-1940. Back then people went to Israel by ship. Eventually Hashomer Hatzair as an organization closed down [following 1947 when most of its members left for Israel] because the Zionists were taught to take the first opportunity to move to Israel. But I didn’t want to emigrate to Israel because I knew straight away that I had obligations. I set myself the task of being the breadwinner of the family since there were mostly women left in my family: my grandmother, my aunt, my mother and my sister. My aunt Edit was just about to get married and only Hari had some miserable earnings. My family was also against moving to Israel. Mostly the family wanted to reestablish itself because my father’s death had been a devastating loss. My mother was a beautiful woman, like the models you see in French magazines, but she didn’t want to remarry even though she was getting proposals from wealthy Jewish men. But the men lacked style and were so smelly that my mother disliked them all.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
Unfortunately, I’ve never learned Hebrew because I never had time to study since I was painting or drawing instead. I took some pictures to the center and hung them on the walls and people really appreciated them. I also drew at the center for them. An awful lot of Jews, who are in very high positions in Israel today, used to go there. I myself used to go there because there one would find the most liberal secular Jewish youngsters, and not the religious ones. But I stopped going when the center turned too militaristic for me.
I was registered at Hashomer Hatzair [8], but I was never a convinced Zionist and neither was my family. The Zionist movement was already in progress in 1937-1938 and it continued into the Hungarian era [9]. The center of the organization was at the end of Horea Street, today’s Einstein Street. In the basement there was a big room where we gathered. There were big dance parties, singing and perhaps even Hebrew language classes.
At home they treated me like an artist and they let me work. I painted on my own sheets because I didn’t have money for canvas. The wall of the house was full of my paintings and the paintings were hung with pushpins because I didn’t have money for frames. I was already working on human figures and I drew my grandmother’s portrait. I drew mostly graphics using pressed charcoal. Those days it was already possible to buy good quality paper in places like the famous Lepage bookstore.
During the week the two men, Hari and Jeno, usually ate in town and they didn’t eat kosher. I know initially they were hesitant to eat bacon and such but later on they even asked me to bring some treyf to the house. By then I was already working in the shoe store next to the food stands and from my tips and the money I earned I bought some food, a little sausage and bacon that I took home. My grandmother wasn’t too fond of this.
While the family lived together we observed seder and there were separate Pesach utensils. The men of the family, Hari and Jeno, were reading and saying out loud whatever they were supposed to and I, 13-14-year-old Egon, had to the role of asking [the mah nishtanah]. We put Irenke, my sister, to sleep because she got sleepy early. Then came the whole story that I had to recite, I was the victim who had to be doing the asking. Besides that, they also hid a piece of matzah for me – it was usually Hari who did it – which I had to find. But I found it because the apartment was tiny and they didn’t hide it on top of the wardrobe, instead they slid it under the tablecloth or put it in the drawer. I remember I asked for a lot of drawing supplies, paint, colored pencils, papers and canvas as a reward.