Tag #129091 - Interview #78031 (Arnold Leinweber)

We had some Jewish neighbors who had come from Transylvania in search of a better life. In the winter of 1928-1929, they had nothing they could use to make some heat, so it was freezing in their house. They had a little girl and they would come to our place to get warm. They couldn’t find a job and they had to stay indoors because of the cold. If we happened to have tea or something, my mother always offered them whatever we were having. This is how they lived through the winter, staying in our house most of the time. In this period, the head of the family tutored me in math. He had been an accountant at a timber warehouse and was a good mathematician. I, who used to hide under my desk in the first grade, so that the math teacher wouldn’t see me, managed to decipher all the secrets of mathematics that an 8-year-old could grasp – from adding 1 and 1 to the rule of three or the calculation of the interest. He put everything down in a small notebook, but I lost it, and some of that knowledge faded away from my memory. At school, my teacher, Mihail Rangu, a special man, sensed I was well prepared and had me write the addition of 1 and 1 on the blackboard – putting the second 1 under the first and drawing a line beneath it –, so that all the children could see how they were supposed to write in their notebooks as soon as they could add; the numbers were no longer added on the horizontal, but vertically. I also showed on the blackboard how a division was made. That accountant had taught me to subtract using the addition, so I checked the result at the same time as I made the subtraction.