Johana Bozoky

This is a photo of my mother, Johana Bozoky, taken in Budapest, in 1927. I think she had only been married a couple of months when she had this photo taken. I didn't even know about this photo, my nephew from Sweden sent it to me after his mother, Alice Meier, my cousin, died.

My mother, Johana Bozoky, nee Seidenfeld, was born in Petrosani in 1903, and she had gone through four classes of high school.

I know how my parents met. I had an aunt, one of my mother's cousins, Victoria, who was married to my father's brother, Emil [she was his first wife]. The two of them met there, within family circles. My mother used to come from Transylvania to Budapest many times, and she stayed at her cousin's, she also had other relatives there, my father visited his brother, and that's how they met. But it was a love marriage, it wasn't arranged. They married religiously in 1927, in the synagogue, they probably had a ketubbah as well, but I don't remember ever seeing it.

My father was drafted into the army during World War I. He used to tell us how life on the front was. He was a young officer back then and he told us that at the officers' mess there was a specific Hungarian dish, which he liked tremendously. It was a dish made from boiled potatoes, cut into little pieces and then put in a pot with fried onion. Then you boiled some noodles, usually the square ones, and put them in the pot. Then you added a bit of paprika on the potatoes, for the color, and when everything was boiled, you stirred it, added salt, pepper; and this was the dish my father liked, but I don't remember what it was called. My mother also tried to make it, as she knew the recipe. She made it at home, but my father didn't like it, he said that it wasn't like the one from the officer's mess and that the officers received better food there. And I know Mother told him, 'Of course, you were hungry there, your guts rumbled, that's why you liked it so much, hunger makes one eat anything!'