Tag #127035 - Interview #78410 (Ticu Goldstein)

While my father was away, we rented his little room to a young man who had come from the North of the country. His name was Sulam Weber. He was a Hasid and he had come to Bucharest to solve his citizenship problem. He was the one who first told me Hasidic stories. They were miraculous, of course, but I don’t remember them anymore now. This man gave my family the most beautiful Pesach of my childhood. Until the beginning of the celebration, Sulam had been very secluded, because of the strict kashrut. He cooked on his own and no one was allowed to get inside his little room, which was actually an entrance hall with cement on the floor. However, on Pesach, he decided to join us: he sat at the end of the table and put some order in our holiday. On the bright, immaculate table, he laid the egg, the potato, the bitter roots, the piece of meat and some matzah. The poverty of this table was soon overcome by his warm, baritone voice reading, reciting the psalms and commenting the Megillat Ester. Being the younger child, I asked, like I did every year: ‘Ma nishtanah halaila hazeh mikol halailot’. The young Hasid sat at the head of the table, like a prince, and he officiated and sang, despite the fact that, in the previous day, he had come back home after having been molested, humiliated and robbed of his shoes by the thug of the neighborhood, whom we had nicknamed Goliath. At a certain point, Sulam stood up and showed us an object he had crafted on his own. He was planning to give it to a magistrate on whom depended the solving of his citizenship problem and who kept postponing him. It was a sort of lamp that projected two majestic lions on the wall. One day after Pesach, Sulam went to the magistrate and gave him the gift. The magistrate accepted it, but had Sulam thrown down the stairs, without helping him; he never got his citizenship and died at Auschwitz, a few years later.