Cassian and Brucha Blumenfeld

Cassian and Brucha Blumenfeld

These are my paternal grandparents, Cassian and Brucha Blumenfeld. I don?t know when the picture was taken, or if it was a special event, but they weren?t so young at the time of the photo, so I assume sometime in the 1920s. My grandparents lived in Botosani at the time I knew them. I don't know whether they were born there or not, or whether they had lived somewhere else before. They both spoke Yiddish, but they knew Romanian as well. My grandparents didn't dress traditionally: my grandfather didn't wear a kaftan, and my grandmother didn't wear a wig. They wore ordinary clothes, like everybody else. They were open-minded people and very kind. They were both religious: I think my grandfather went to the synagogue every day, because there was one close to them, but my grandmother didn't. They followed the kashrut, observed Sabbath and all the high holidays. They lived in a house with two or three rooms, and a kitchen. They didn't have a garden, but they had electricity. Their house had no running water, and they heated it with wood. They were rather well-off. They had nice furniture and they could afford a woman to come and clean and broom the house, although my grandmother was a housewife. I don't know what my grandfather used to do for a living when he was young. I don't remember him ever going to work, and I never heard my mother or my father talk about his job. They got along well with their neighbors, both Jewish and Christian. They had two sons: my father Moses and Adolf Blumenfeld. My grandfather died in 1930 and my grandmother some time after him, in the 1930s.
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