Marcel Goldstein with his friends from ORT

This is my borther Marcel together with his mates from ORT (Organization for Rehabilitation through Training), at a party. The elderly person, the second on the left, was their boss. The photo was taken at the beginning of the 1950s. My parents only had two children: my brother, Marcel Goldstein, born in 1924, and myself, the younger one, born in 1929. I remember Marcel as a handsome and elegant boy. He would've made a good actor. He started working at a very early age, when he was about 12. Unfortunately, he wasn't too keen on studying, although he was very intelligent, loved to read and read enormously. Actually, it was him who brought books in our house, as all we had before that was one book about reading the future in a coffee cup. He also brought a gramophone on which we played synagogal music and operas. My brother was crazy about opera and would often go to concerts at the Romanian Opera. He would get in whenever he wanted to, as he bribed the ticket collector. He had a cheerful nature and he loved to go to parties. He had many friends among the students, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Most of them were poor, and he would help them once in a while, as he was already employed and earned money. First, my parents sent him to be the apprentice of a clock smith named Carniol, in order to learn this trade that was widespread among the Romanian Jews with little means. That was in 1936 or 1937. Unfortunately, Marcel sort of lacked the patience required by this profession: he would fix the clock with one hand and scratch the wall with the other, out of boredom. However, after the war, fate ironically had him placed in charge over the clocking devices of the Electromagnetica Enterprise for a while. So he had to be the first to get to work and he was forced to wake up at 4 every morning. His nickname was Pendulica [a diminutive for grandfather clock in Romanian], because grandfather clocks were his hobby. He had managed to make up a pretty fine collection. Anyway, after the clock smith apprentice routine, my parents sent him to be an apprentice at Bernard Kaufman's stores, where my brother worked as a shop-assistant for a few years, until around 1940. After the war, my brother, Marcel, took a specialization course at ORT , where he learnt the trade of clocksmith again. He got married in the 1960s. His wife, Blanche, was very beautiful and cultivated, although she had not attended any higher education. They didn't have children. At a certain point they got divorced and she left for Israel. My brother remarried a Romanian woman named Coca. Unfortunately, they had hardly anything in common - they were not compatible at all, their natures were much too different from one another. My brother died at a relatively early age, at 64, in 1986. He is buried at the Jewish Cemetery on Giurgiului St. He didn't have any children.