Erzsebet Radvaner's end of the year class photo in middle school

This is a class photo made at the end of the school year in middle school in 1922. I went to the primary school in the Nyar street. I was the best pupil the whole time I was there. Then there was the Maria Terezia higher school for girls, on Andrassy Street, which lasted for six years. It was very difficult to get in there, as it was just for the rich. The husband of the sister of one of my aunts was the director of a publishing house and he had connections to all of Pest. My mother went to him and told him that she would like to get me into the Andrassy Street school. He said that he could get me into any school in the town, but not there: 'She would only learn to show off there. Put her into the middle school,' he suggested. That school was on Nagydiofa Street. I was the best pupil there too. My social circle was mostly Jewish. I had very many boys around because anybody could come to our house, boys and girls. My mother was the most wonderful person in this world. We would go to the zoo every evening during the summer, because there were classical music concerts on the Gundel Terrace next to the zoo. Two brothers, who were our friends, had entrance passes for the zoo and we all got in with that one pair of passes. All of us got in separately at different gates, giving the passes to each other through the rails of the fence. There were ten or fifteen of us. From the age of fifteen I always went to concerts. Before that, Laci and I and two cousins of ours went to the town theater every Sunday afternoon. You can not name a singer or a conductor whom I did not hear. My father was not interested in classical music. My mother liked it, but never went to concerts. It was the hobby of my brother. My brother was a very cultivated child. He was only interested in classical music. And he read and read. There were not too many books at home, but we read books from the library all the time. And we read everything: Gardonyi, Mikszath, Jokai, and so on, with Hungarian literature.