Tag #124060 - Interview #102267 (Felicia Menzel)

I remember the political climate before World War II, my mother talked about it. I remember one funny incident concerning Cuza [after whom the Cuzits [4] naming comes]. My mother had a cousin, Ela Finkelstein was her name: Ela was more beautiful than my mother, but my mother was well-read and polite, so they spent time together. Before the war broke out, Ela and my mother went to the university in Iasi, to attend lectures on the German language, as that was my mother’s specialty. They weren’t students, they just went there from time to time.

Herr Professor Cuza was renowned for his anti-Semitic opinions, and for the fact that he only spoke German with the Jews, despite knowing Romanian. He was also renowned for two other things: that he talked in a lisping voice, so he pronounced ‘j’ as ‘z,’ and that ‘he didn’t like Zews, but he did like Zewish little women’!

So one day, my mother and Ela were coming back from the university, and their shoe laces got loose, they had probably left the university in a hurry: so Ela bent down to tie my mother’s laces, as my mother couldn’t do it herself, because she was wearing stays, and so was Ela. When it was my mother’s turn to tie Ela’s shoelaces, out of the blue appeared Herr Professor and tied Ela’s shoelaces; and he knew very well that they were ‘Zews’!

I remember there was talk in our house about anti-Semitism; my mother thought that the greatest anti-Semites were the teachers, professors and priests, because they were teaching the students to be anti-Semites too. There was also a common prejudice, that Jews have red hair, which wasn’t always true.