Since I was a Party activist, we occupied half of an apartment – we had a living room that measured 3 meters by 3 and a half, a bathroom, a kitchen, and we shared the hallway with someone else. It was at 14 Unirii Embankment, opposite the Morgue. Now there’s a large apartment house there. After my wife gave birth [in 1949], my father-in-law died, and my mother-in-law came to live with us. We never had any spare time. Money wasn’t enough. The cost of living went up, so I, the great economist, had to work at home to make some extra money – electric work and some hand-made objects. We put a small bed at the entrance, as if we had a common bedroom; and there was also the baby’s crib. In the morning, we took it out in the hallway. I asked the union for a place to live and I got one on Sfantul Gheorghe St. We didn’t have a bathroom, only a toilet with a small sink, and a kitchen. Such were our living conditions. But at least we had a large room for us and our little girl and her iron bed. My mother-in-law’s bed was in the living room. My wife was assigned a three-room apartment in the Balta Alba [quarter]. It had two bathrooms. We purchased it [after the revolution], but I had to sell it [later], because I was unable to pay the utilities.
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Displaying 3571 - 3600 of 50826 results
Arnold Leinweber
No matter where they are born, people are helpless in their fight against nature, so they feel the psychological need for some support, and this is God. But everyone has a god: Buddhists, Adventists, Christians, Muslims, Pentecostals, Protestants, Lutherans, you name it. We, the Jews, stuck together because of our ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’ and the persecutions, which forced us to be united; morally united, because, from a material perspective, every man had his own tent. We are the people of the Bible, those who passed the 10 Commandments on to the world through Moses, the one who spent I don’t know how many days on the mountain and broke the plates against their heads when he found the idol they were worshipping. These commandments were the source for Napoleon’s code, the judicial code that was adopted by everyone. This and many other wonders were possible thanks to the Jews, these people who knew how to keep their history by means of the word. So I am not religious, but I am a Jew.
The Judaic religion so many rules concerning human relations and hygiene, and the kashrut leads straight to absurdity. There is a difference between cooking in a vessel that had milk in it and cooking in the milk vessel or the meat vessel; then you must have a whole different set of vessels for Passover. If you don’t, you must boil them with sodium carbonate to make them clean. You mustn’t eat bread, but only matzah – I mean all this seems a little extreme to me. I had an argument with one of my father’s cousins in Israel. I called him without realizing it was Friday night, and his wife picked up and told me he was at the synagogue. The following day, he told me: ‘Well, Nicu, you committed a great sin. You called me and my wife had to answer the phone!’ - ‘Yes, I did that. And you are so right’, I said ironically, ‘I committed a huge sin, I used the phone and you didn’t answer!’ And I asked him: ‘Do you take your wife out for a walk on Saturday?’ - ‘Sure I do.’ - ‘So this means you should leave your door unlocked; and if you feel the need to go to the toilet, you should refrain yourself. If your wife’s answering the phone was a sin, so is locking the door on Saturday, flushing the toilet, eating, doing anything, right?’ This is all absurd in the year 2000.
When I visit their tombs, I recite the Kaddish, of course, but this is a formality which doesn’t help at anything – it is about tradition, about one’s feelings, about one’s paying respect to the memory of the people whom one knew and loved.
The old Aparatorii Patriei quarter disappeared in the 1980’s. A sea of apartment houses lies today in the area that was used for farming. The place where our house used to be is now surrounded by new buildings and streets. I, who spent my childhood in the middle of nature, inhaled fresh air and saw the starry sky, confess I still miss it. None of the buildings I knew survived. Everything was demolished during Ceausescu’s regime and new buildings were erected to accommodate more people who came from outside than people from the neighborhood. The terrain was cleared by the demolition [22] of the modest houses, which had small courtyards and orchards. My mother was given a studio somewhere on [Ion] Sulea [Dr.], in the Energeticienilor quarter. Then I took her at my place, because she couldn’t live alone anymore. And so, the people of the old neighborhood scattered around and they lost track of one another.
I listened to the Radio Free Europe [21] and kept myself informed. Considering myself an honest and fair man, I couldn’t accept the humiliation of people who had to stay in line to buy bread. In order to buy cheese and meat, one had to queue up in the evening to make sure he’ll get something the following day. People didn’t buy what they wanted, but whatever was available. I felt frustrated. Had such things happened during the bourgeois regime, the Communists wouldn’t have accepted them and would have urged the people to rebel. But if you protested, you were seized immediately and sent to cleaning windows or wiping floors, or put under arrest.
My mail was read [by the Securitate] [20], but I didn’t mind. I once wrote that my girl had been courted by a police captain. He was a crime investigator at the police station in the Balta Alba quarter, where we lived, and they had met in the trolley-bus. The man was examined. ‘You know’, he told me, ‘they started asking questions about my planning to get married!’ He was kept under surveillance by the Securitate officers from the police station – they knew everything about him, because it was their duty to keep an eye on their personnel. In order to arrange for their marriage, I had to go to Aneta Spornic, a former minister of education. ‘What have you got against this boy? He fell in love with a girl whose father was a Party activist, whose grandfather was involved in revolutionary activities, and whose step-grandfather, Leinweber, risked his freedom to host outstanding Party figures who are now ministers!
Our relatives from abroad wrote to my mother. All those who left, both those from my father’s side of the family and her own, had first passed through her place. So she had all their addresses. When I went to Israel, in 1974, I took all those addresses, plus those of the people from the old neighborhood. Some put me in contact with others, so I managed to visit around 50 families of relatives, acquaintances and friends. I got to 75 [families] in 1977. I would go on my own and was a surprise to them. When I went to Israel with my wife, in 1981, I couldn’t do the same thing – I had to take her with me in my visits, so I didn’t manage to tackle as many families as before. The last time I went there was in 1996. I knew many had died in the meantime. I came back a sad man.
Why didn’t we move there? We were about 40 years old, our girl was in high school, so her education was a problem. My wife was a brilliant, highly respected clerk at the ministry. What was she to do down there? Be a maid? Who needed an accountant who didn’t speak Ivrit? Besides, neither my wife nor my daughter could cope with heat. When summer came, we stayed indoors. Our house was cool and we felt good in it. We would lock ourselves in to prevent people from bothering us. ‘We’re leaving! We’re not leaving! We’re leaving!’ There was a certain state of mind that pressured you to leave, to let yourself carried away by the wave. We had an iron door on the outside and we would shut it to make people believe we had left and live in peace. I saw everything there was to see in Israel – beautiful girls and all that –, but only as a tourist. It’s hard to live there, with all the scumbags from Vacaresti Ave. and Dudesti Ave. who became successful, while the competent people who believed in moral values struggled with poverty until they got on their feet a little.
My ‘dowry’ consisted of a blanket and an eiderdown that I had made myself, and some sheets and pillows given by my mother. My wife didn’t bring anything – they had lost their house in a bombing. According to the law, when people got married, they got an extra salary. With our money combined, we bought a wardrobe, a lousy carpet, a desk, an electric lamp and a gas lamp, and this is how we started our home.
She had a good reputation, so the Ministry of Light Industry appointed her head of a millinery department. Then she moved to the knitwear and ready-made clothes department, where she was in charge with all the centers countrywide. Knitwear contracting was her responsibility – she had become an expert. She retired in 1981.
She worked as an accountant for the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party until she had the baby, and then she moved to a food store.
This is how I felt when I first went to Israel [Mr. Leinweber reads one of his own poems]: ‘I once descended from a plane / And a porter sitting by the stairs greeted me: Shalom. / This made me feel human, / A special human being, wrapped in the warmth of this word. / Shalom, this welcome word tickled my heart and my feet. / (Why was I so moved?) I stepped upon your holy land full of history / A land that was longed / By a Diaspora that has always wanted / To have its own country, in days good and bad. / You welcomed many and held them up in your arms / Together you erected what many others failed to erect. / Your creation, a paradise on Earth, and the one on Mount Sinai / Bear the flag of Zion / Which will for ever wave. / Shalom.’ [‘De pe scara unui avion candva am coborat / Si un hamal ce langa el statea mi-a spus Salom! / Eu am simtit ca sunt un om, / Eram un om mai deosebit, caldura ta m-a invaluit. / Salom!/ Acest cuvant de intampinare eu l-am simtit in suflet si picioare./ (De ce am fost emotionat?) Paseam pe al tau pamant plin de istorie si sfant, / Un pamant ce a fost dorit / De o Diaspora ce a voit / Mereu sa aiba tara ei la bine si la greu. / Pe multi tu i-ai imbratisat si cu caldura i-ai ridicat. / Impreună ati clădit ce multi alti n-au izbutit. / Creatia ta, gura de rai si cea de pe Sinai / Poarta stindardul cu Zion / Si flutură în veci / Şalom.’] My feet got soft. I couldn’t walk and I felt a sort of drowsiness; I couldn’t control myself. I felt the same in front of the Western Wall. Only thinking of it makes me feel excited. It’s as if something were falling upon you, pressing and squeezing you, then lifting you up into the air. It’s hard to explain. And we wonder why people cry there – a surface in a mere square.
In 1948 [when the State of Israel was created], there was joy, there was enthusiasm, there was momentum. I was surprised – Sada had come to Jerusalem, to the Knesset, to make peace.
So I am not religious, but I am a Jew. The Torah ceremony is a historical event. When entering the sukkah, people celebrate their harvest. The oil that kept the candle burning created the Hanukkah, another moment of joy, the holiday of light, which Rosen [19] used to create the Hanukiad – something that astonished all those foreigners, who came here to see what it was all about. [Ed. note: The Hanukiad is the name that Mrs. Moses Rosen gave to the tour encompassing the Jewish communities in Romania, which was created in the 1970’s, on Hanukkah. Foreign guests were invited to these visits that were organized by the leadership of the Jewish community.] Rosen himself said we don’t have a religion, but a tradition which we observe: the tradition of food, the tradition of relations between people, the tradition of celebrating some events. Man needs to cling to something, he needs some moral support, and I respect that.
At 16, my school sent me to the seaside [by the Black Sea]. I was sent there three times. The third time, the reason was the good job I had done as head of my group at school, which determined the camp’s commander, doctor Dumitrescu, to call us there. I saw the place where the Dniester River flows into the sea [currently on Ukrainian soil]. The water there was clearer than a spring’s, and the beach was very wide, with sand dunes in which the foot would sink. When we had to return to the camp at noon, after having frolicked for hours, we couldn’t walk, but we had to run like crazy to reach the ground, because the sand was too hot to walk on. Another nice thing about that place were some very small mollusks in the sea, which died once they were thrown on the shore. In the evening, we would walk on the shore and find phosphorescent lights – the sea was full of shiny little stars. My boy scout’s hat had a sort of lyre-shaped lily on it. I would put these small crawfish on it, and my hat would glow in the dark. I enjoyed scouting very much. We slept in tents. The tent was partly buried in the sand, so that the wind wouldn’t blow it away and the tide wouldn’t drag it to the sea. Some ropes tied it to stakes. There were pretty tall weeds growing there, and we used them to make the base of our tent. We put the tent sheet over it, we stuffed the pillows with weeds, and this was our bedroom. I stayed with the other two heads of groups in a tent of three. Others stayed in tents of six, eight or ten. One day we were playing with a brick that was thrown in the water. The one who found it had the right to throw it further away, and the others had to look for it. Eventually, all my companions got bored, so I continued to play on my own. The current began to drag me towards the Dniester. As it was growing stronger and the water was getting deeper, I was getting tired. I was swimming towards the shore, but was not succeeding in getting away from the current. In that desperate moment, when I was facing death, I remembered that one of the boys, Tache, had said before a bonfire: ‘The current is a lot less strong at the bottom!’ So I dived to the bottom and started swimming. From time to time, I surfaced to breathe, and then I dived back. It took me an eternity to get to the shore. I just lay there for a while, to regain my powers. The following year, I could swim much better, as I was already a grown-up, and I raced for kilometers.
When I was nine and a half years old, a Jewish association, the ‘Lumina’ Lodge, gathered all the needy Jewish children at the Cultura High School [12], on Zborului St. After being examined by a medical commission, I left to Poiana Tapului on holiday. Aunt Liza said to my mother: ‘Oh, Surica, all the children left to a camp in Poiana Tapului! Quickly, you must send him too!’ My mother bought me a train ticket and took me to the station, where she passed me on to the lady who went there and who promised her she would take me to the camp too. It was then that I saw the mountains [the Carpathians] for the first time, and I fell in love with them. The son of the headmaster from the Moria School happened to be in the same camp with me. A rivalry was born, as kids became attached of me. I had my own fir tree, and it was tall enough, and the upper branches were curved in a way that allowed me to sit comfortably and swing. In order to get rid of the kids, I used to climb in it, and from there I could say whatever I wanted to. It was a very beautiful month. I experienced the magnificence of a fantastic moment: after a rain, on the other side of the railroad, where Zamora was, the foot of a rainbow was formed in a clearing. This image remained in my memory all my life. It was fabulous, it was huge, it had two strips. Last year I wrote a poem about it: ‘Poiana Tapului, Zamora, with proud mountains and fir trees / Somehow kept me at their bosom / For a moment at noon. / The Prahova was flowing slowly, carrying the whisper of springs, / The tiles on the roofs charmed me with their color, / In the forest, the Urlatoarea, a raging waterfall, / Went its’ way, cool, fresh, gay ... After the rain had stopped and the skies had slowly cleared, / A rainbow foot towards the Zamora appeared.
Since we lived in the Aparatorii Patriei quarter, we would go to the Berceni Dr., which was full of caravans of carts loaded with vegetable and fruit. Of course, we, the kids, followed them and cried: ‘Won’t you give us a tomato or a pepper? May your horses live long! Won’t you give us a water melon, Mister? May your horses live long! May you have a good sale at the marketplace!’ The people were good-hearted and they gave us peppers, eggplants, tomatoes and water melons. We would eat the tomatoes and the water melons on the spot, in the ditch by the side of road. The drive was on higher ground, and there were bushes on the edge of the ditch. Everyone put down his ‘harvest’, and we didn’t go home for lunch anymore. The first time I came back home with fruit and vegetable in my shirt, my mother was scared and astonished: ‘What happened to you?’ She was preparing to beat me. ‘How could you beg?’ - ‘Well, all the other kids did it, so I did it myself!’ This was part of the fun too.
When the time of the racial laws [numerus clausus] [11] came, there was no change in the social relations in our neighborhood. We had the same degree of friendship and understanding between people. The cause was our poverty. Everyone left downtown or came there to exercise their trade, which hardly provided them with enough to survive. Except for counsel Stoica, shoemaker Saraga, and a clerk who worked at the Pop and Bunescu store, today the Bucharest [store], our neighborhood had no intellectuals. All the inhabitants were craftsmen, people who led a hard life, so there was no time for chauvinistic, anti-Semitic manifestations. The neighborhood also had Hungarians, Germans and Gypsies. Of course, there were a lot of Jews too. But the majority population was Romanian.
There were many Jewish families in the Aparatorii Patriei quarter – over 60 families –, so the need was felt for someone to perform religious duties. The neighborhood was founded in 1927, at the outskirts of the capital, on a ground divided into lots. There was no pavement, no electricity, no sewerage, and no drinking water. There was a well here and there, from which water was extracted from a depth of 25 meters. We couldn’t afford an outside man, so a cooper from our neighborhood, named Rotstein, who had a lot of children and was familiar with the elements of the Judaic cult, became our religious servant. But on holidays, we still had to bring a hakham to slaughter our poultry. And since this cost pretty much, Mr. Rotstein went to a hakhamim school, probably at the Community. He was authorized to perform the ritual slaughtering, so he was both the religious servant and the hakham of the neighborhood. He was also the one who continued to teach children to read and write in Hebrew. The problem we faced was where to hold the religious service, as we didn’t have a synagogue. So a Jewish citizens’ committee was founded to deal with this problem. We needed a building large enough to allow room for us all – and there were many of us. And we organized a sort of balls in order to fund this building that was also going to shelter the kindergarten. The Romanians’ committee of the neighborhood did the same - they were more than we were. Jews went to the Romanians’ balls and the Romanians filled the Jews’ hall. I don’t know how much money was raised at these balls, because I was only a kid. The president of our committee, shoemaker Saraga, who owned a small store on Regala St., and counsel Stoica [the president of the Romanian committee], the only man in the neighborhood who had a brick house, agreed to do everything together. The money was gathered in one place and it helped to build a school with two classrooms - since the neighborhood didn’t have a school -, a church, which is still there today, and the synagogue [it didn’t have a name, it was known as the synagogue in Aparatorii Patrieie], which sheltered the kindergarten for all the neighborhood children. The opening of the kindergarten was attended by the prefect of the City police, Gen. Marinescu.
But the most exciting moment was when my [maternal] grandmother took me to Victoriei Ave., to the LaFayette store – the Victoria store today –, to admire the windows. There was a Santa Claus, a little Christmas tree, a train that kept moving in a circle, a doll, a little car, and I was happy to see all those things. But I never got to actually touch and play with such toys – I didn’t even have a rag ball.
Since electricity hadn’t been introduced in people’s homes yet, there were no electric irons, but only charcoal-based irons. Charcoal had to be bought from the people who walked the streets yelling ‘Get your charcoal!’ People would come out and buy this charcoal; it was as vital to their existence as water, which was carried in water-carts and sold by the bucket. The water was brought from Dudesti Ave. The water-carts gathered on the spot where the [Vitan] post office lies today. The first electric tram passed by this water supply center. The tram number 19 left from the end of Vitan St. and went downtown. It ran on Dudesti Ave., Vacaresti Ave., the then-Bratianu Blvd., and got to 1 Mai Blvd., to the Chibrit Bridge. These are my modest recollections of that time.
I spent my childhood in Bucharest, in the Vitan quarter, on Foisorului St., where I was born and where I took a bite of all the games of that age. As a child, I would go out through the window while my mother was at the workshop, earning her living, and I knew the neighborhood very well. The Dudesti [quarter], where I lived, was inhabited by modest, hard-working people, and life peaceful there. One of the special events was when it rained heavily and the water coming from Vitan flooded Foisorului St., went round a hill, and headed down to the River Dambovita. The water’s withdrawal was the kids’ joy. When we looked in the street’s gutter, we found wonderful trifles: marbles, steel balls, buttons, pierced coins from the time of King Carol [I] [9], and good money from the time of Ferdinand [I] [10]. We used the change to buy half a Turkish delight, which was 50 bani, or a full one, which was 1 leu. This sweet was sold by people from Oltenia who had come to Bucharest. They made a living selling Turkish delight with cool water, of course, which they carried in a bucket. The water came from some springs which flowed into the Dambovita. One would get to them by going down some steps.
Apart from these moments of joy of our childhood, we were also happy when we had money. If we didn’t, we would just yearn for what we couldn’t have; we would stare at those Albanians or Turks who passed by yelling ‘Cool «braga» [millet beer], cool «braga»!’, and carried a device on their back, a sort of pump, on which they would lean to fill the glasses. There was another sort of Albanian merchant who cried his merchandise in the street too: he sold some green and red peppers on a stick, or some red lollipops on a stick. The kid who had money would buy this delight and, while he was licking it, the others were, of course, yearning for it. The rest of the commerce was equally picturesque. In the morning, the men from Oltenia came from what is called today the Natiunii Marketplace, carrying baskets loaded with vegetable and fruit. They would sell on credit, marking the debt in red chalk on the door frame, from where no one would have dared remove it. They would say: ‘It’s all right, Ma’am, you’ll pay me when you have the money!’ People were poor and had no cash. The milk lady used the same chalk marks. She would draw one, two, three, four lines, and, when she got to the fifth, she crossed all of them with a line. Five crossed lines represented five liters of milk. In the afternoon, another man from Oltenia would come – he sold fish on credit. There was also the man who sold an exceptional yogurt – only seeing him slice a portion made you drool.
Apart from these moments of joy of our childhood, we were also happy when we had money. If we didn’t, we would just yearn for what we couldn’t have; we would stare at those Albanians or Turks who passed by yelling ‘Cool «braga» [millet beer], cool «braga»!’, and carried a device on their back, a sort of pump, on which they would lean to fill the glasses. There was another sort of Albanian merchant who cried his merchandise in the street too: he sold some green and red peppers on a stick, or some red lollipops on a stick. The kid who had money would buy this delight and, while he was licking it, the others were, of course, yearning for it. The rest of the commerce was equally picturesque. In the morning, the men from Oltenia came from what is called today the Natiunii Marketplace, carrying baskets loaded with vegetable and fruit. They would sell on credit, marking the debt in red chalk on the door frame, from where no one would have dared remove it. They would say: ‘It’s all right, Ma’am, you’ll pay me when you have the money!’ People were poor and had no cash. The milk lady used the same chalk marks. She would draw one, two, three, four lines, and, when she got to the fifth, she crossed all of them with a line. Five crossed lines represented five liters of milk. In the afternoon, another man from Oltenia would come – he sold fish on credit. There was also the man who sold an exceptional yogurt – only seeing him slice a portion made you drool.
I go to the temple [the Coral Temple], because there are no synagogues left in my neighborhood. There used to be scores of them in the past. Each street had its synagogue, and each guild had its synagogue – the carpenters, the shoemakers, the tinsmiths, and all the others. The members of each trade had the ambition to have their own synagogue, which was a very good thing.
I personally don’t have a favorite holiday. To me, the Jewish holidays are historical holidays, holidays of joy, celebrations of certain events related to agriculture and to the ancient life of the Jews – there’s nothing religious about them, in fact. The fact that, on Yom Kippur, people pray to God for forgiveness of their sins and for reconciliation between men who did wrong to one another, is a purely human thing. I was never a religious man. After my bar mitzvah – I did my duty, like any Jewish child –, the everyday work and my job prevented my contact with the Hebrew letters. When my father took me to the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, he put the tallit on my shoulder and had me read from the siddur, but I couldn’t get it right – I read either too slowly or too fast, and he never knew where I was. This annoyed me, because it made me feel stupid, and made me forget everything I ever read. Even if I go to the synagogue only on festive occasions, this doesn’t mean I don’t feel like a good Jew.
Romania
On Purim, it was a real joy when the masked characters came to your house, had a drink, ate your cakes, and thumbed their noses at you because you hadn’t recognized who they were. We, the children, had a great time in those days. This lasted until the quarter was demolished. The Jews left to pursue the aliyah, and there were none left in the neighborhood.
It was a pleasure to see the sukkah built by the Jews of our neighborhood, one more beautiful and more elegant than the other.
There was a synagogue in our neighborhood – it didn’t have a specific name, it was the synagogue in Aparatorii Patriei. There could be no service held in the morning in our neighborhood, because most of the men went to work and the remaining ones weren’t enough to complete a minyan. There was no service in the evening either, but holidays were treated with all the respect due to the historical moments they celebrated: Yom Kippur, Sukkot etc.
My parents observed the holidays. My mother lit the candles on Friday, but they weren’t devout Jews. They never missed the synagogue on holidays, but weren’t so religious as to go there every day. Besides, they had to go to work.
When I went to high school, I was too old for new tricks [after World War II], so I struggled with the French, Latin, and Russian language. I passed my graduation exam at 40 years old, at the ‘Zoia Kosmodemianskaia’ school [Ed. note: This was the name that was given to the Central School for Girls after 1947, in honor of a teenage Soviet heroine who died for the communist cause].