Samuel Izsak and his wife Sari Izsak

Samuel Izsak and his wife Sari Izsak

This photo of me and my wife Sari Izsak, nee Ungar, was taken in 1946 by a street photographer. In the back there's the fragment of a street in Kolozsvar, but I don't recall exactly, which part of the city it was in. It was probably a street downtown. I married Sari Ungar in 1945. She was born into a Jewish intellectual family in 1916. She spent her childhood in Szilagysomlyo and Nagyvarad. She was working as a clerk. We got acquainted and married in Temesvar. We only had a civil marriage. We were very poor and didn't organize a party after the wedding. There was just a family dinner at which only my wife's family and my mother took part. We moved to Kolozsvar because I was a student then and I had to continue my studies. We both had been supported by the Mark Antal Student Organization and dormitory. We stayed on the edge of the city in a basement apartment, in very humble conditions. Then, at the end of the 1940s, we moved to Jokai Street [a street that looks onto the main square], into our current home. When we moved here, however, only one of the four room was ours, three other families lived in the rest of the apartment. There were quite a few discrepancies related to using the bathroom and the kitchen. We lived in these conditions for five to six years. After our children were born, we requested the housing board to allocate the whole apartment to us. It wasn't easy, we could only gradually take over the rooms, and after many fights.
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