The Jewish community invited me around 1969-1970, when Miklos Kertesz was the president. He was a lawyer originally. Otto Rapaport worked as a director at the Hungarian theater and he organized the cultural life of the community and he asked me to help. Later, at the end of the 1970s, he emigrated to Israel and was the editor-in-chief of the Hungarian newspaper, the Uj Kelet, there for a long time. Nowadays, I give lectures about Jewish history and culture, work as a coordinator at the Romanian Jewish journal, which appears every month – I work mainly on the articles devoted to the Jewish history of Kolozsvar – and I'm a member of the leadership of the community, which means that they invite me to a meeting from time to time and ask me to give my opinion on various matters.
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Displaying 20701 - 20730 of 50826 results
Vasile Grunea
At home we didn't observe traditional Jewish holidays, we didn't light candles on Sabbath. I didn't make a Pesach night [seder] ceremony for my wife and son, although I would have been able to do it. At Pesach I brought home matzah from the Jewish community for my wife and the kid, though. The kid knew what matzah was, but we also had Easter eggs at Easter because it was a tradition for my wife. We had a Christmas tree, that is, there was a duplicity concerning this at the time, because there was no Christmas tree under the communists, but they allowed the so-called Winter-tree and there was the so-called Father Christmas. And 90 % of the people decorated the Winter-tree before Christmas but drew the curtains tight so that it couldn't be seen from outside and they opened the curtains on 30th December, before the New Year's Eve of the Peoples' Republic, to pretend that they decorated the Winter-tree just before New Year's Eve.
My son graduated from a Romanian secondary school and joined the army because he failed at his first entrance exam to university. Then he took an exam to enter the Faculty of Law. While he was studying at the Faculty of Law, he worked as a technician and later as an editor at the Radio of Kolozsvar, and then he graduated from university. His wife is a Romanian from the vicinity of Des, she's a biologist. My son lived in Des for some time; he worked as a legal adviser there, and then he started working as a judge, first in Csikszereda and now in Kolozsvar, and he is the president of the court in Szamosujvar. He has two children. His son, Dan Emanuel Grunea, graduated from the Faculty of Law of Babes-Bolyai University this year, in 2003. His daughter, Maria Emanuela Grunea, graduated from high school this year. My son considers himself more Romanian than Hungarian. As his father is Jewish and his mother is Hungarian, he cannot deny his origins, but he is more part of Romanian society. He isn't circumcised.
She wasn't religious either, so my son wasn't raised in any religious tradition. My son knew, even before 1989, that his father was Jewish and his grandmother and grandfather were Jewish, and he has visited them in Israel, too. He knows the broad outlines of the history of the Jewry, but he doesn't know Jewish religious traditions. He only knows cholent, for example, from the canteen of the Jewish community.
We talk both in Hungarian and in Romanian in the family. We talked in Romanian for quite a long time because my wife was a Romanian teacher, she taught Romanian in three secondary schools and a lyceum here in Kolozsvar.
My wife knew that I was a Jew, she was a Unitarian, but both of us kept our own religion. We never discussed it with my wife that I should maybe become a Unitarian or she should convert. Although I have a feeling that if I had wanted her to convert to Judaism, she would have done it for me. But we never discussed this. Of course, we have had many, many Jewish friends and they all know that she is Hungarian and their attitude to her has been very good and her attitude to them likewise.
Romania
So, I dare to stand up for my truth with arguments, and it is important to debate because if you don't debate, some people may think that they are right. Although I have a feeling that it's like talking to a brick wall because those who don't believe that it [the Holocaust] happened, will continue to question it. Soon, we can talk about anti-Semitism without Jews in Romania. Because how many Jews are there here? There are about 10,000 Jews left and what does it matter, a 10,000 Jews? The former Prime Minister, Petre Roman's father was a Jew, and what's more, his grandfather was a rabbi, but he considers himself a Christian, all the more so as his mother wasn't Jewish. But some people still bring this up, asking how a Jew could have become Prime Minister. So, there is intolerance here; when we start a discussion, it always comes up that one is a Jew or a Hungarian. The other big issue now is gypsies, that this or that person is a gypsy.
I would have never believed that so many people who had lived side by side with you for so many years behaved differently and never told you ‘stinking Jew' in the face only because they were afraid or they didn't have the opportunity to do so. After 1989, it turned out from one day to the next that they weren't your friends but your enemies. One could hardly believe his ears when he heard what one or another person said, or some people even wrote, in which they showed themselves as ‘Hungarian-eaters' or ‘Jew-eaters', it was hard to believe that it still existed after 50 years of brainwashing. It shows that instincts are unfortunately stronger than common sense.
And 1989 was obviously a relief, the time had finally come when you didn't have to live in duplicity any longer, saying one thing to your wife at home with the door locked [and something else at your workplace]. And saying nothing to the kid, lest he would blurt out something and both he and you would get into trouble because of this. Obviously, I felt a big relief that the time had finally come when you could be whatever you wanted to be and express things the way you wanted to express them. What had a very bad effect on me, however, was that I had hoped, like everybody else, that the change of regime in 1989 [following the Romanian Revolution of 1989] [36] would bring a radical and rapid turn in a positive direction, and unfortunately it brought negative developments in many respects. Nationalism, open anti-Semitism and xenophobia, and anti-Hungarianism especially, became much more emphasized. It was like a boiler that had been suppressed politically and then suddenly exploded after 1989, and this brought a great disillusionment to us.
I retired in 1990. The Fundatia Culturala Romana [Foundation for Romanian Culture], whose goal was to report on Romanian cultural life to foreign countries, was set up in Bucharest at that time and a Centru de Studii Transilvane, a research center, was founded here in Kolozsvar to study and popularize the history of Transylvania. To that end, they publish the Transylvanian Review in English and French four times a year. They also publish books. They invited me to work for them, and I worked as a technical advisor for a few years and participated in the editing of several books for them. From time to time some articles are published on the earlier and recent history of the Jews of Kolozsvar in the Realitate and I'm the coordinator of this and, if need arises, I bring things under control. I held quite a few lectures on Judaistics to Jews and Jewish youth, organized and advertised by the Jewish community. I participated in several national interethnic lectures and interethnic lectures organized abroad.
From the 1980s on anti-Hungarianism and anti-Semitism became in fact more pronounced; for example, Hungarians and Jews who were in higher positions in different workplaces were laid off and Romanians gradually got into leading positions. This couldn't really be done in literary circles, there were always Hungarians beside the Romanians in the management of newspapers. It can be a long discussion to what extent writers and intellectuals of Jewish origin contributed to interwar and postwar Hungarian literature. There were Jews, for example, in the management of Utunk and Korunk, Erno Gall [31] and Pal Soni at Korunk and Laci Foldes at Utunk. We don't think of them today as Jews any more: although they were Jewish by origin, they declared themselves Hungarian authors, who belonged to Hungarian culture. We must distinguish these people from the Hungarians and Jews who played a leading role in the party leadership, since they played this leading role as communists and not as Hungarians or Jews.
Looking back, there were many editors who didn't agree with what was happening during the Ceausescu era – it doesn't make them heroes today, though. But this doesn't mean that they would have dared to publish their opinion.
The control became tighter in the 1980s. When the boss [Ceausescu] or the lady boss [his wife] had their name day or birthday, for example, we were told how many photos and articles had to be published about them and in what spirit they should be written. And what was especially hard in the later years of the regime was that they weren't satisfied with the fact that we published the poems of unknown authors, but they insisted on having the best writers writing poems about them and singing their praises. At first they were satisfied with anybody but then they started demanding why this or that one wasn't writing about them. Some people refused saying that they were ill, or they hadn't been writing for years, or regretfully they couldn't write, or weren't worthy of writing such poems because there was something in their past, or whatever excuse they could find. It's easy to condemn better-known people today for writing such hosannas…, the youth today doesn't understand it, but I must add that there was enormous pressure on us at the time.
We started to study again the abstract literature and abstract art, the avant-gardism of the interwar period, because it was obvious that Romanians, such as Marcel Iancu or Ilaria Voronca, played an important role both in the French and the Swiss avant-garde. The one question that was a taboo throughout the Ceausescu era was religion, because it was a big problem for both Ceausescu and the ‘lady' [his wife, Elena Ceausescu]. So, fine arts, for example, couldn't deal with religious themes, nor could we publish anything on religion in the paper. They went so far that there were some words, for example ‘Sir' or ‘Madam', which could only be used in a pejorative sense. Besides, there were long lists, of course, with the names of those who couldn't publish, or whose writings, if they were already dead, couldn't be published in the paper. As to foreign writers and especially Romanian writers living in emigration, there was a time when their works were translated into Romanian and we could talk about them. But then if they happened to make a statement about the Romanian communist regime that wasn't positive enough, their names were put down on the list again and we couldn't publish them.
The early Ceausescu [29] era was more open in some ways, they adopted in a way the Chinese saying that ‘all flowers should be allowed to blossom'. They allowed the names of such people to appear in the press as Blaga or Arghezi, which had been forbidden before. [Editor's note: Lucian Blaga (1895-1961): Romanian poet and philosopher; Tudor Arghezi (1880-1967): Romanian writer.] The names of progressive but not communist art critics from the interwar period, such as Comarnescu, just as that of Moisil, the still world-famous mathematician, appeared often in the press. Interwar writers, for example the Titans of the late 1930s, could be published more often, although the main line was still socialist realist literature, they propagated this and obviously reviewed such works. But as I said the good thing about it was that there was more openness in literature, as well as in the fine arts, and many things which hadn't been allowed in the fine arts before were allowed then.
I went to Israel for the first time in 1970 and I saw my father for the first time since he had emigrated. All in all I went to see them at least ten times, I think, and I usually stayed for a month or two. My wife has never been because the ‘custom' back then was that one member of the family always had to stay behind to guarantee [that the family would not emigrate, since a family wouldn't stay abroad without one of its members.] They always invited her, too, but she said, ‘You should go to see your parents, it's more important for you.' They didn't invite us to stay for good, they only mentioned it when I was there and they were very diplomatic even then. It was especially during my first two visits that my mother tried to show me the whole country, so that I could see what was there with my own eyes, she didn't try to convince me, but she wanted to show me the reality. And she told me frankly that my wife, being a teacher of Romanian language and literature and having no other profession, would experience great difficulties in Israel in economic terms, but only in such terms.
I started publishing in the Realitatea Evreasca [Jewish Reality] in the 1960s; it was called Revista Cultului Mosaic [Journal of Mosaic Faith] at the time and it was founded in the 1950s under Moses Rosen [27]. Heim Rimer, who was the editor-in-chief at that time, asked me to write for the paper. I published two longer essays on the history of Hasidism [28], as well as an interview with Marcel Iancu, the world famous painter, who came from Romania originally, and I published all this under my Hebrew name Zvi ben Emanuel.
That's when I started working for the Tribuna, at first as a proof-reader, and later as an editorial secretary, and of course, I published poems, translations, reports on theater and fine arts, and interviews.
I was expelled from the Party in 1959 for the simple reason that I had been a member of a socialist-Zionist organization, the Hashomer Hatzair, between 1942 and 1945. They knew this because I put it down in all my CVs, I wasn't ashamed of it and I didn't hide it. And a resolution was passed, which stated that no one who had been a member of any other party could be a member of the Communist Party.
In 1956 the atmosphere was quite tense at the radio because of the events in Hungary [1956] [26]. It was quite difficult to make programs in Hungarian because Bucharest, that is, the center, kept asking us for materials condemning the counterrevolution. And there were few Hungarians, of course, who condemned the counterrevolution. So, it was a rather difficult situation, and on top of it, there was a strong wave of arrests; young Hungarian educational cadres from Bolyai University and secondary school students were mostly arrested, so the atmosphere was dense. It was difficult to get materials as well, and, although there's nothing to be proud of now, we still tried to minimize the amount of these materials. As people could get the broadcasts of the radio of Kolozsvar in Hungary as well, the programs had to be in line with Hungarian politics, so we broadcast materials that called upon people to stay and materials in which people who had went from Romania or Hungary to other countries, especially to capitalist countries, in the interwar period, described how hard it was to live abroad and how foreign countries didn't receive well the Hungarians. So, the atmosphere was like this a bit. No one from the radio was arrested, only one person, Zoltan Keresztes – who died since then – was advised to leave because of some statements that he had made in the radio.
There was no anti-Semitism directed against me at the radio either. Of course, one could hear whispers about why two Jews were the heads of the radio, because Lajos Racz was also Jewish. Lajos Racz Romanianized his name to Ludovic Ratiu, he had been an illegal communist. He was a doctor by profession but he had always worked in politics, he was a party activist here in Kolozsvar after 1944. At first he was working in the radio studio of Bucharest, but then in 1952 he was appointed editor-in-chief in Kolozsvar and was the director of the radio in Kolozsvar. Later he was transferred to the central radio in Bucharest. One could hear such voices but no one came up to me to say, ‘You stinking Jew, how come that you are the deputy editor-in-chief of the radio?', but we were working in an atmosphere where some people were wondering why this or that person was in a certain position. Or there were some colleagues who made statistics of how many people were Romanian, Jewish and Hungarian in the staff and how many of them were in the management. So there were such manifestations in the background, but no one complained openly, you couldn't say things openly, like today. So, I can't say that there was no anti-Semitism, but communist ethics and morality rejected this in theory. And there was a law on national minorities, which condemned any manifestation of chauvinism, xenophobia and nationalism and imprisoned people for it; this law is still in force but no one keeps it any more.
I moved back because they called me again and said that we would organize a radio studio in Kolozsvar. A man called Ludovic Ratiu came from Bucharest at the end of 1952 and worked in Kolozsvar for some time until he organized the radio, which started broadcasting on 15th March 1953. I was deputy editor-in-chief until 1959. As deputy editor-in-chief my task was as a member of the management, to listen to or read all materials before they were broadcast – live or from tape. The most important criterion was quality and the authenticity of news, which corresponded, of course, to the political line of the time. The news was written in Hungarian or Romanian and I had to listen to them; besides I also made many programs myself. I made countless interviews with famous intellectuals, there are still many, many tapes in the golden tape repository of the radio studio in Kolozsvar, and there are also many tapes there that were broadcast with my signature on them. I made interviews with many personalities at that time, for example with writers Istvan Asztalos and Istvan Nagy, poet Aladar Laszloffy, actors Gyorgy Kovacs and Mihaly Fekete among the Hungarians, and writers Agarbiceanu, Emil Isac and Aurel Rau among the Romanians. It didn't matter if we made an interview with a Romanian or a Hungarian personality. And of course when new people joined the editorial team, we had to help them. At that time they usually looked for worker-cadres, so they went to factories and chose some people there, brought them to the editorial office and it turned out after two, three or four months that one was suitable and the other four went back to their former workplace.
They called me in 1952 and said to me: ‘A newspaper must be founded in Topanfalva and we thought of you, we appoint you editor-in-chief.' It was quite difficult because my son was only a few months old in 1952 and my wife was still a student, so I had to leave the family behind in Kolozsvar and move to Topanfalva. The only one good thing about it was that the newspaper was printed in Kolozsvar, so I was in Kolozsvar every week from Saturday morning to Monday noon. Monday noon I took the so-called mocanita narrow-gage railway back all the way from Torda up to Topanfalva.
My name change coincided with journalism. At the beginning Vasile Grunea was a journalistic pseudonym, and later it became my official name as well, but I cannot say that I was forced to do so by anybody because it simply wouldn't be true. I had used the name Laszlo Gruber until then and I was even called Ocsi [Laddie] in my childhood. Those who know me from that time call me Ocsi even today. I have no idea why I chose the name Grunea and not another name.
I directed the cultural part of the paper, that is, the publishing of book reviews, theatrical reviews and literature. But it was a daily, the main task of which was the propagation of the political line of the Party. I was still a university student at that time. I was sent to a higher school of journalism in Bucharest at the end of 1949 and in 1950. The school lasted for about three quarters of a year; it was an express school, where we had ten hours of lectures and seminars a day. After the school I went back to the Lupta Ardealului and worked there as the editorial secretary-general.
In Kolozsvar I met a quite well-known poet, Toma Gheorghe Maiorescu, who was also Jewish. He came to Kolozsvar from Resita – now he lives in Bucharest – and wrote several books. He worked for the Lupta Ardealului [Fight of Transylvania], a communist daily, which was at first the paper of the Kolozs county branch of the Party and later became the local daily. There was no other Romanian daily at the time. Maiorescu recommended me and the editor-in-chief invited me to work for them. I started writing for them and I was invited to join the editorial staff in 1948 and worked there until 1952.
I was still a student when I started writing articles on the subject of youth for the local paper of Brasso, the Drum Nou [New Way].
Erzsebet enrolled into Bolyai University majoring in Romanian literature and language. She was still a student, in the 2nd or 3rd year, when our son, Vasile Gheorghe Grunea, was born in 1951.
My mother wasn't very pleased with my marrying a non-Jew. Although she had nothing against her as a person, only against the fact that she wasn't Jewish. My father kind of resigned to it, although he wasn't very happy either. But my mother said it openly, ‘Don't do this, my son!
I met my wife, Erzsebet Galfi, in 1949. There was a club called ARLUS at 1 Egyetem Street, where the editorial office of the newspapers Tribuna and Steaua and the headquarters of the Writers' Association are located today. It was quite a well heated place, at a time when places weren't well heated in Kolozsvar. It was the club of the Asociatia Romana de Legaturile cu Uniunea Sovietica, that is, the Soviet-Romanian Friendship Association. As it was well heated, secondary school students who lived in badly heated dormitories or rented rooms usually spent their afternoons there. There was a very good library and a rather cheap buffet there, and one could also play chess and do what-not there. I used to go there, just like my future wife, and we met there. She was in the last year of the Unitarian Lyceum for Girls and she was a very pretty girl. I soon married her; we got married in August 1949. We went to the people's council with two witnesses – one was her classmate and the other her husband, a teacher – and after the wedding we invited them to have a beer and a Wiener Schnitzel in a restaurant, and that was it.