My maternal grandfather, Pinhas, or Pincu, as the Romanians used to call him, Schatz, was born in Iasi in 1852, and he was a grain shop owner; he kept two modest stands in a market place that had recently opened back then. He sold all sorts of cereals like flour or corn flour, and macaroni and sugar, products which didn’t come in contact with meat.
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Displaying 47941 - 47970 of 50826 results
Felicia Menzel
He owned a shop with cereals and other grain products.
From what my grandmother used to tell me, he was a very religious man, who wore payes and a beard. I remember she mentioned to me that he was sometimes harassed by hooligans in the street, who used to pull him by the beard.
My other great-grandfather, my maternal grandmother’s father, was named Fainaru and he was a shop owner in Iasi.
I have heard family stories about my great-grandfather, my maternal grandfather’s father, Idel Schatz. He lived in Iasi as well, and died when he was 110 years old. He studied at a yeshivah [educational institution dedicated to the study of Judaism's traditional central texts], and he was a scholar; he was offered to become a rabbi, but he refused, he said he didn’t want to become a ‘schnorrer,’ as he said in Yiddish, a beggar. So he opened a private school for boys, where he taught them Gemara [rabbinical commentaries and analysis]. He also taught prayers, since boys were required to recite Kaddish at family funerals. He was also a chazzan at a synagogue, because he had a beautiful voice.
Booba Adela went to the USA to live with them in the late 1920s, when I was eight or nine years old.
My father, Saia Grunberg, had one elder brother, Iosif Grunberg, who lived with his wife Ani in the USA, in Philadelphia. He was a photographer and she was a dressmaker, I think.
Despite my efforts, I haven’t yet received any help from the government, because of my husband being drafted into forced labor during the war.
He died in 1999, and I wasn’t happy about how the community handled the funeral, there were some administrative changes inside the community going on back then, and it wasn’t so well taken care of. An old man from the community, Mr. Lazar Bercovici, recited the Kaddish.
Zoltan became more interested in religion as he was getting older, he even went to a minyan on Saturdays.
We went to the synagogue during communism, but only on the High Holidays.
We struggled to get by financially during communism: we could manage because my husband traveled a lot around Stalin county, as Brasov was called back then, and he had his meals and accommodation paid for; so his salary was spent on household expenses.
When Cornel was on vacation from university, he told me that a Securitate officer had come to him, here in our house and tried to make him become an informer amongst his university colleagues. He refused, of course.
I never had problems with the Securitate, but I did have one incident with them. A neighbor of mine told me that in this very building was a secret location of the Securitate. A doctor from Sacele [town in Brasov county, 25 km away from the town of Brasov], called Pap, lived on the ground floor; I never knew him, he had moved back to Sacele before we moved into this house, when my parents-in-law died. A man came to ask me all sorts of questions about him and I saw a gun under his coat. I wasn’t afraid, I told the truth that I never met the doctor, and he left.
Apparently they had discovered some writings or documents of his in his house, which were against the regime.
Apparently they had discovered some writings or documents of his in his house, which were against the regime.
My husband and I listened to Radio Free Europe [9], we bought a radio and we took it with us everywhere we went, especially when we went to Covasna, on vacation. We turned it on in the hotel room and listened to it very quietly. I was forbidden to listen to it, of course, but on that occasion we did: I didn’t listen to it much, I didn’t have time. My son, Cornel, did listen a lot, but he was a more relaxed character and didn’t tell us what news he heard.
When he first arrived in the USA, he worked at several companies, and now he does something for the government in and around Washington; he travels a lot, but I don’t know exactly what he does.
He emigrated to the USA in 1975; he had to spend some time in Paris first, I don’t know exactly why, because of emigration regulations, and then he went to Philadelphia.
My son studied for three years at the Construction Institute in Bucharest. He didn’t complete the course, because we insisted on having him in Brasov, but in order to attend the courses of the Polytechnic here, he had to take six more exams, and he didn’t want to. He stayed at home for a year, but he worked, doing translations from German into Romanian for somebody. He also had a certificate of foreign commerce from Bucharest.
Our circle of friends were mostly Jews, and friends of my husband; he had had a lot of friends! I remember going with another couple to Harghita [spa located in the vicinity of the Harghita Mountains], just after the war ended, and pulling in at an inn there. Back then inflation was still high, and it was hard to find all the food you needed. The innkeeper served us with roasted sucking pig, a delicacy we had never had until then, because we ate kosher food in Iasi, and later because it was hard, actually impossible to find on the market! Anyway, we ate it. After the war we couldn’t keep kosher anymore.
We never thought of emigrating to Israel, because of the climate. My piano teacher from Brasov, who was a Jew and an artist, went to Israel and had to come back as the climate gave her asthma. My husband couldn’t stand the heat, and anyway, none of us knew the language.
We first rented a furnished room in town, and then a one-room apartment in the same house. My mother-in-law didn’t want us to live with them, she said it was better for the young to stay separate from the old, to start fresh, and she was very right.
Again I got a job as a typist and as a secretary at the cooperative Sarguinta. I never had problems at work because of being a Jew, and neither did my husband.
A friend of my husband’s, Stern, a Jew who was an activist, helped him get a job at Steagu [Steagu Rosu: Red Flag plant in Brasov that manufactures trucks], so eventually we came back to Brasov and we stayed here.
After Bucharest we moved to Tarnaveni [town located in Tarnavelor Plateau, on the banks of the river Tarnava Mica], because of my husband’s work again. I didn’t work there, I only took care of Cornel, but the conditions were terrible. We lived in a colony, and we had no running water, I had to keep a servant to help me fetch it and so on. Moreover, the environment was toxic, there were calcium carbide plants all around us. Cornel fell ill, and we eventually had to go back to Brasov.
I was working in Bucharest when I heard about the birth of the State of Israel [8]. I was happy; I think every Jew in the world was. The wars there affected me as well; it affects me if they cut a finger off of an Israeli soldier.
Cornel didn’t have a bar mitzvah. He wasn’t interested in religion or tradition at all; he identifies himself as a Jew, but that's all.
I worked for a while at the Ministry of External Affairs, also as a secretary, until my son, Cornel Menzel, was born in 1949.
We left Electrica and Brasov in 1948, when my husband was transferred with work to Bucharest. He worked at a rubber plant, in charge of the financial division, which belonged to the Ministry of Chemistry.
My husband voluntarily joined the Communist Party, he was an idealist: I remember he was fond of the book, Marx’s Youth. I joined the Communist Party as well, simply because my husband wanted me to: I wasn’t keen on politics. But I figured that our schedules would match, he would go to his party meeting, and I to mine, so I joined, since it was so important to him. We had to participate in marches on 23rd August [7], it was compulsory, you could find yourself in trouble if you refused; I was a secretary, and I had access to some relatively secret or important documents, so I couldn’t refuse. My husband and I participated in party meetings, and he took the floor sometimes, but I never did.
My first job after the war was as a secretary for a Swiss company. Right after the war, there was a strong campaign against everything that was German, including the language and the literature, which was plain stupid, because the German people had achievements as well.
I was hired because I knew German and French: the manager, Zender, was a German, and he had a beautiful French wife. The typist was a Saxon woman, and she wrote down all correspondence in German. But as it was common practice that correspondence was written in French, I had to translate from German into French, which was rather hard: his wife helped me as well. Zender closed down his business, he was terrified of the Russians gaining power, and after that I worked at the Electrica plant as a secretary.
I was hired because I knew German and French: the manager, Zender, was a German, and he had a beautiful French wife. The typist was a Saxon woman, and she wrote down all correspondence in German. But as it was common practice that correspondence was written in French, I had to translate from German into French, which was rather hard: his wife helped me as well. Zender closed down his business, he was terrified of the Russians gaining power, and after that I worked at the Electrica plant as a secretary.