Tag #123099 - Interview #101186 (Leizer Finchelstein)

Progress was everywhere. Radio appeared and it was a great wonder. I was still living in the Targu Cucului neighborhood when I bought this radio equipped with a record player, and the entire courtyard gathered together whenever I turned on the record player and especially when I played certain records. These were songs from the soundtrack for The Tramp [Ed. note: The movie referred to is “Awara,” with the English title “The Tramp,” directed by Raj Kapoor. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043306/] and many other songs whose tune everyone hummed. We managed to buy a television set later on. We were among the first people in the neighborhood to own a television set, and when we turned it on, people sat on the floor, I had no place left to seat my neighbors. We had 2 rooms separated by a door. The television set was in the back of the rooms and people sat on small chairs from in front of the television set all the way to the front door. And there were some 30 people inside the house, all of them friends of ours. That was around 1956 when the Romanian Television first started broadcasting. Nobody dreamed in those days about remote controlled color television sets, computers, the Internet and so on.