I do know that in 1912, when he married my mother, he had already been here in Hungary for some years. He spoke pretty good Hungarian. Maybe here and there he had a little accent, which showed that Hungarian was not his mother tongue. I can remember that he counted in Yiddish.
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Displaying 20671 - 20700 of 50826 results
Klara Karpati
His birth name was Hirsh-Leid Grunberg. He wanted to “magyarize” his name and went to the ministry repeatedly until he was finally given permission to change it. This could have been around 1926-27.
In 1956 we nearly emigrated to Israel.
My husband and I visited Israel once. There were no diplomatic relationships then, so I did not know which embassy would allow us to go. In Israel, I saw that there was hatred where there should have been none. A Jew should simply be a Jew, and there should be no discrimination because one person is from Europe, and another from somewhere else. I do not like this.
Vasile Grunea
During Chanukkah we lit one candle more every night. We had a chanukkiyah and we lit that. We usually invited some children over and five-six of us sat down to play with the dreidel; I still have the spinning top that we used. There are four letters on the spinning top, which has to be spinned. I cannot remember which letter represented ‘get’, ‘give’, and ‘you don’t get anything’. [Editor’s note: The four letters on the spinning top are ‘nun’, ‘gimel’ ‘hey’ and ‘shin’, which stand for the sentence ‘Nes gadol haya sham’, that is, ‘A great miracle took place there’. The ‘nun’ stands for ‘you don’t get anything’, ‘gimel’ stands for ‘get all’, ‘hey’ stands for ‘get half’ and ‘shin’ stands for ‘give’.] We played for small candy, they were the stake. Adults didn’t really play this game.
I also had another teacher, a very tall thin lady, she was called Tolstoy and she was a member of Tolstoy, the writer’s family. She taught me French and German.
Romania
Parents usually hired private English and French teachers for their children. We had a madame Madleine, for example, during the war, who taught us French. We also had a teacher of Russian nationality, who taught us English at home; he was called Karabansky and I think he had been an officer in the tsarist army and military attaché in England for some time.
Romania
I finished one year in this school, I learnt the locksmith-fitter trade. It was a four-grade school and I stayed on for another year and a half and worked as an assistant to the master craftsman. Then I went to work at a gas-fitting company and worked as a gas-fitter for some time. There are still many houses, or more precisely, stoves in Brasso into which I fitted the gas burner. Gas was being installed in Brasso at that time and it was quite a popular trade and one could earn quite a good salary. We, Jews, couldn’t earn as much as the others because we weren’t allowed to work legally, but we could still make quite a good living, since everybody wanted to have gas installed as soon as possible, and the owners of apartments where we installed gas often courted us, so we were given a fine meal for tea and a tie or some other present when we finished the work. Among my friends, three of us worked as gas-fitters, two of them became doctors later and I became a journalist.
Romania
My sister went to the Principesa Elena and she was going to start the 4th grade there. Both these lyceums were Romanian. A few months after I had been expelled, the Scoala de Meserii Evreasca a Comunitatii Evreiesti de Rit Occidental din Brasov [the Jewish Trade School of the Brasso Jewish Community of Occidental Rite] was founded. The ‘Rit Occidental' [Occidental Rite] meant that it was Neolog. So, it was the trade school of the Neolog community offering the locksmith and locksmith-fitter trades to boys and tailoring and sewing to girls, and this school operated until August 1944. But it was a four-grade school only, we couldn't study for eight grades there, so we studied at home.
After finishing the Jewish elementary school in 1937, I enrolled into the Dr Ion Mesota Lyceum. I had finished the 3rd grade there and the 1940/41 school year was about to start and I was going to start the 4th grade, when the Antonescu [18] regime passed the numerus nullus [19] for Jews and I couldn't continue studying in a Romanian school.
Romania
Stein loved children and he often put the car at the disposal of his son and his friends, so on Sundays we would often go on hiking trips around Brasso – to Predeal, Sinaia, the Valley of Prahova – from morning till night. During the war the authorities confiscated not only the radios but also the cars and even bicycles of the Jews. I know that they took two bicycles from us.
Romania
We were among the first people in Brasso at the end of the 1920s that had a radio. At the beginning one had to crank the telephone, a woman picked up at the other end, you told her what number you wanted and she connected you. The radio was a novelty to the operators as well and they asked my father from time to time to put the receiver close to the radio so that they could listen to it, too. If I remember well, the first model was a mark called Nora, which was a tall circular model. Unfortunately we had to hand it in in 1942 when Jews were no longer allowed to own a radio, even though this radio remained with us only as an antique and we already had another big radio, a Standard. When the war started, the authorities forbade the Jews to have radios to make sure that they wouldn’t make propaganda. We took one of the radios, the Nora, to the police station, but we knew that one had to plug something into a specific place in order to make the radio work. They came to us saying that we gave them a bad radio because it didn’t work. Then I went back and plug this thing in so that it would work. My father didn’t want to hand in the Standard, as well, so he arranged with a Saxon bank clerk to take and hide it. The situation changed and since most of the Saxons supported Hitler during World War II, the Romanian authorities confiscated their radios after 1944. Then it was my turn to go to this Saxon in a carriage and took his two radios to hide.
Romania
According to tradition the Jews erect four wooden posts with a canvas, a kind of canopy above it, next to the synagogue, and not inside it, and the wedding takes place under this canopy. As far as I know, the Neologs conduct the wedding under the canopy but inside the synagogue, while the Orthodox conduct the wedding outside the synagogue. I don’t remember my parents attending the mikveh. We always had apartments with a bathroom, so we didn’t need it for cleanliness and they weren’t so religious as to go just because of the tradition. But my sister did go to the mikveh before she got married.
Usually there was a mikveh in every Jewish community with many people. Women were supposed to go to the mikveh at least once a month to be purified. But even if they didn’t go every month or every week, the rabbi wouldn’t marry them under a chuppah if they hadn’t been to the mikveh just before the wedding.
My parents didn’t lead a very active social life. The two women’s society, the Orthodox and the Neolog, often organized tea parties in the afternoon. My mother went to both because she had friends in both places. The ladies would gather and sit around the rummy tables and play rummy, drink a cup of coffee or tea, have some cakes and tell each other the gossip around town. My mother had Jewish friends mostly. After the war they no longer cared for rummy. There was also a social thing, they organized a soup kitchen for poor children usually in the wintertime. All poorer children who went there received food for free. It was organized the following way: every day different women brought food and also participated in preparing the meal. They volunteered to bring flour, meat and vegetables, and cooked the meal there. The Jewish community rented a bigger room, not far from the Orthodox synagogue, and they had the kitchen there. The kitchen had a cook and waitresses. My mother also participated in running the soup kitchen.
Korona on Kapu Street was the most famous restaurant and hotel. I remember that before the war my father and mother dressed up elegantly usually on Saturday night and went to the Korona to have dinner and dance. I’m sure they had friends there. Even though they had kosher food at home, they would go out in the evening from time to time to have mixed grill and a glass of beer, in the Gambrinus restaurant, for example. Our Orthodox rabbi, Sperber, knew about all this but closed his eyes for a while, but he was a rather vehement rabbi and spoke out against them from time to time in the synagogue on Saturday, but of course, he didn’t go as far as to mention names. But I think that it made no impression on my parents.
My parents also read and my father was very fond of reading dailies. They subscribed to both Hungarian and Romanian newspapers. Among the Jewish newspapers, we got the Uj Kelet, to which we subscribed, although it was published in Kolozsvar. Once a month we got the Mult es Jovo [Past and Future], the chief editor of which was Patai. There was a very good cigar store next to the lottery ticket office, where my father bought the so-called democratic journals every day. I remember that the Brassoi Lapok was a Hungarian daily of very high standard in my childhood; among newspapers appearing in Bucharest, my father always bought and read the political dailies Adevarul [Truth] and the Dimineata [Morning]. And we also got the Korunk [17], which was regarded as a progressive leftist paper at the time and was published here in Kolozsvar. I also remember seeing the Pasztortuz from time to time but we mainly got the Korunk. The Pasztortuz was also published in Kolozsvar but it was a more bourgeois Hungarian literary paper. I was brought up on these newspapers.
There were Zionist organizations where the youth got together, the activities usually took place on Saturday afternoon. People from about the age of 14 were accepted into the organization, and there were lectures, dances and songs taught in each youth organization. There were several Zionist organizations of different streams – bourgeois, socialist –, and one could choose which stream to join. My father joined socialist Zionism, the Barisia organization, which included mostly students and Jewish intellectuals. There was a restaurant called Kahana and they usually gathered in the room of the restaurant on Saturday afternoon – I don’t know whether they got the room for free or they rented it. There was a smaller old house behind the Neolog synagogue, which had several rooms and at one time the Zionist organizations had three or four rooms there. I belonged to the Hashomer Hatzair [12] socialist-Zionist organization.
There was no yeshivah in Brasso, but there were always yeshivah bocherim who came to teach before finishing the yeshivah. The bocher taught me two basic things: one was the prayer that one has to recite before putting on the phylacteries and the prayer shawl. A boy puts on the phylacteries and tallit for the first time in his life on his bar mitzvah and from then on he’s supposed to put them on every single morning. The other thing he taught me was the pericope [weekly Torah portion], which falls on the Saturday when the bar mitzvah is held. One learns it basically by heart to be able to recite is smoothly in the synagogue. After the ceremony a tikkun, or celebration, is organized at home or in the entrance-hall of the synagogue. I had my bar mitzvah in November; at that time only the small hall behind the main hall of the synagogue was heated in the winter and I recited what I had to at the table there. Then we invited home my best Jewish friends and they brought presents, a fountain-pen, a propelling pencil, and mostly books, just like on a birthday. And there were cakes, of course. My sister didn’t have a bat mitzvah, in the Galut in Brasso it wasn’t a custom to hold a bat mitzvah.
I was circumcised and I had my bar mitzvah as well. I went to preparatory classes to a bocher who studied in yeshivah – rabbis didn’t deal with such trifles at the time.
I didn’t go to cheder. There was a four-grade Jewish elementary school in Brasso, where the language of teaching was Romanian, but there were Hebrew classes, which were held by the director of the school, Kain, for a while. Religion classes were mainly held by rabbi Deutsch and in the framework of these classes he usually gave us lectures on Jewish history, Jewish self-esteem, arts, and Jewish writers. What’s more, he also organized a youth service for the pupils of the school on Sabbath. The Jewish elementary school – which was officially called Scoala Primara Izraelita Brasov [Israelite Elementary School of Brasso], I think, and had only 4 grades – was located in the same street as the Saxon elementary school, we were separated by an alley-way only; we had blue caps and the Saxons had red caps. I went to this elementary school from 1933 to 1937. It happened very often that when we or they left school, we ran into each other and they picked a quarrel with us and we had fights. We must have been more vehement because we beat them up from time to time and then the director of the Saxon school came to complain to the director of our school. We got to know about these visits because the director used to call us and tell us not to fight with them again. So, there were such conflicts between us.
My sister is called Judit Gruber and she is one year older than I. Looking back now, I can see that she could always think more maturely than I, although there’s only a very small age difference between us. She helped me a lot in my studies both in elementary and secondary school. When she was in first grade, I was still in kindergarten, and when I went to first grade, she was already in second grade.
In Hungary there was official anti-Semitism [that is, there were anti-Jewish laws in Hungary] [11], which went back to a longer time than in Romania, but my parents didn’t think that the Hungarian situation was any better. Older Jews, people a generation older than my father, were reminiscent, of course, of the good old Franz Joseph times, saying that ‘things were better under Franz Joseph’, because Franz Joseph was a good emperor from a Jewish point of view. One part of our larger family was in America and the other in Israel, the only closer relatives who were left in Noszoly were my uncle and my aunt. We talked it over in the family whether it wouldn’t be better if I and my sister came to live in Kolozsvar, as there was a Jewish lyceum here and we could attend it, but we didn’t actually agree on doing it. Later on, towards the end of the war Jewish refugees started to arrive in Southern Transylvania from Northern Transylvania, who told us about the deportations, so we didn’t really feel like going to Hungary any more.
We usually went from Brasso to Kolozsvar and then on to Noszoly; my parents put me and my sister in charge of someone who took us to Kolozsvar. Until 1938, as long as Uncle Valter lived here, we spent a week or two with him and until my aunt Piroska left for Israel, we spent one or two weeks at her place. Then my uncle or my aunt took us to Szamosujvar by train. When we were older, my uncle took us to the station but he didn’t take the train with us. It wasn’t a problem: we got in the train and got off in Szamosujvar. The father of my aunt Margit’s first husband had a workshop, which was incorrectly called a soda water factory. In reality it wasn’t a factory but two machines for filling bottles with a worker who filled the bottles with soda water. Sometimes we stayed there and waited to be picked up, at other times the horse-drawn cart was already there when we got there. Later we took a bus to Noszoly, which was 24 kilometers from Szamosujvar. Our last trip to Kolozsvar together was in the summer of 1940, just before Transylvania was handed over to Hungary [this was the so-called Hungarian era] [10]. It was announced on the radio and it was an open secret that the Hungarians would occupy the territory. That’s when we went to Noszoly for the last time, and that was our last meeting with Uncle Marci Sporn and Elli. I still remember that we returned home from Kolozsvar under horrible conditions. The trains were terribly packed because they were the last ones to go from Northern Transylvania to Southern Transylvania before the Hungarians occupied Kolozsvar. We got into the compartment and then we couldn’t go out until we got to Brasso, it was simply impossible to walk down the corridor.
I spent about a month in Noszoly during the summer vacation. There’s a lake between Cege and Noszoly, the Lake of Cege, where carps come from today, because there is a fish farm there. It was very nice because we went to the lake on foot or on a horse-drawn cart – they lived some 4 km from the lake. I went to Noszoly with my sister and I usually took along a friend or two from Brasso to make my uncle happy.
My father had a tallit and phylacteries. I didn’t really see him pray at home but he prayed in tallit and phylacteries in the synagogue on Sabbath. He was very well acquainted with the Jewish traditions: he had spent six or seven years in cheder, he knew all the prayers by heart and sang very nicely. He usually recited the prayers with a melody and I still remember for example what melody he used on the two seder nights. I didn’t have to study these melodies, I had imbibed them from infancy. I heard them every year and learnt them forever.
The Jewish elementary school and the rabbi’s apartment were built next to the Neolog synagogue. When the legionaries [9] occupied the temple in 1940 or 1941, they wrecked it and even stole the organ pipes. They turned the Jewish school into a dormitory for legionary students and evicted Armin Deutsch, the Neolog rabbi.
The difference was more apparent in the synagogue because the Orthodox were more traditionalists. The poorer stratum was Orthodox and the wealthier stratum attended the Neolog synagogue. The Neolog synagogue was one of the few synagogues which had an organ and in the interwar period the Jewish choir was led by a non-Jewish musician for quite a long time.
On Purim there was usually a concert in the Redut, which was originally a big concert and dance hall. They usually organized a fancy-dress ball for children there; I remember that I was once dressed as a boot-maker. The adults had a Purim ball in the evening but I have never been on their ball, so I don’t know whether they also dressed in fancy dress or not, but I remember that the children did. It didn’t matter here who was Orthodox and who was Neolog.
As to the definition of my Jewishness, it’s like the saying in Yiddish: ‘Shver zu zayn a yid’, it’s hard to be a Jew. So, it’s a pleasure to be the son of a nation, which has a long and great history and at the same time it’s a big burden because if you take it upon yourself to bear this history, you have to behave in a way that no one can say anything bad about you as a Jew – that’s how I see it. If someone comes up to you and says that you should throw down your cigarette in the street, you mustn’t do that, lest they would say that this Jew is dirty. It’s not always a great pleasure. Another problem is that you who have a family tree that goes back to several hundred years and proves that you are at home here have to prove day after day that you belong to this land. It’s a strange thing that it’s you who have to prove after several hundred years that you are not a stranger here. That you have the same rights and obligations as all other people here.
Romania