Tag #122646 - Interview #101182 (Simon Glasberg)

Times were very hard after the war. Although my father had a store – he started to rebuild his store at the outskirts of Radauti, where we lived, on Putnei Street no. 162 –, even though my mother managed to get her sewing machine working again, we struggled to get by, but times were very, very modest. Which is why at a certain point my father recovered his former horse from before the war and bought a cart so that he could do the supplying of the store himself. Among his customers were even people of different ethnic origins – Romanians, gypsies, even some Czechs or what have you. There was one in particular, and I remember him to this day, because he wore a beard, he said his name was Cerny, with a ‘y’ at the end. He was from Czechoslovakia – Slovak or Czech, I don’t know for sure. But there were others who came to borrow. Times were very hard, poverty was widespread, there was also a severe drought back then – at least in Moldavia –, and people came to borrow on credit.

As long as he lived – only 59 years - and inasmuch as I knew him, my father was a man of rare good nature. He was almost too kind, too good-natured. As a dressmaker, my mother, who was more pragmatic, more calculated by nature, would tell him: "Husband, pay attention to whom and how much you give, for you won’t have enough money to pay the wholesaler for the merchandise." My father couldn’t follow her advice, out of pity for people, and he would record the debts in a notebook – he had a very calligraphic handwriting – but this didn’t mean that everybody paid him the money. On the contrary, many of them couldn’t pay their debts and, after a very short period, 3-4 years after the war, my father went bankrupt, because he literally couldn’t pay for the merchandise he received, and it was only with the help of one of his brothers in Bucharest, Fritz, that he managed to escape legal punishment.