This is the last photograph of my paternal grandmother; she died soon after this photograph was taken. The photograph was taken in 1935 in the Vatra Dornei mountain resort. From right to left: my paternal grandfather, Avram Mizrahy, my grandmother, Lucia Sara Mizrahy [nee Rubinstein], and a friend of theirs whom I don’t know.
My paternal grandmother was born in 1873 in Bucharest. I met one of her brothers, Moritz Rubinstein, and one of her sisters, Rosa Olivenbaum [nee Rubinstein]; they both lived in Bucharest in the 1930s. My paternal grandfather was born in 1864 it seems, in Varna, Bulgaria, and came to Bucharest when he was a child. I think he had a sister, Mazal . He owned a small clockmaker's shop on Carol Street. The shop may have been small, but the sign was big, visible from a distance: 'A. Mizrahy - house founded in 1884'!
The Mizrahy grandparents had their 'quarters' on Banu Maracine Street. My grandfather still spoke Ladino, but the language spoken in their house was Romanian - without foreign accents, even without inflections. All his five children - my father Moscu, Leon, Suzette, Carola and Solomon - spoke the literary Romanian fluently. It was in these 'quarters' that my father grew up together with his two brothers and two sisters. Both my father's sisters lived on Banu Maracine Street, on neighboring plots, with a common courtyard. My paternal grandmother died in 1935, and my paternal grandfather in 1940. They were both buried at Bucharest's Belu cemetery, in the Spanish section.
