Tag #127914 - Interview #89861 (Dan Mizrahy)

As for the daily life in those years, the knife was beginning to reach the bone. Everything became a problem – from the daily necessities to comfort. In order to pay the external debt the regime had decided to impose drastic internal savings. These ‘savings’ involved driving the local population to starvation and restrictions in power, thermal energy and fuel consumption. There were times when, in order to buy a loaf of bread, you had to show your ID card to prove you lived in Bucharest, lest the peasants should buy bread to feed their animals, God forbid! The butcher’s stores sold pig hoofs, bones and chicken tacamuri. The ‘tacamuri’ were claws, wings, and heads of slaughtered poultry. In order to purchase a 1-kilogram pack of meat you had to stand in line the night before, hoping a truck would come in the morning and they would ‘bring’ meat. Whenever a store sold meat, a queue formed out of the blue and the verb ‘to sell’ was replaced by the verb ‘to give.’ ‘What are they giving here?’ – ‘They’re giving meat.’ I remember a joke from that period. An American passes by such an interminable queue and asks in surprise: ‘What is going on here?’ – ‘They’re giving meat,’ the reply comes. And the American goes: ‘Oh, in that case, I think I’d rather buy it.’ Here’s another one, more ‘subtle.’ A man standing in a queue to buy meat is cursing violently: ‘Damn him! To hell with him and his entire kin! May he rot in hell!’ Two civilians seize him, take him to the police station, and hand him to the lieutenant who’s on duty. ‘Who are you cursing?’ he asks him. ‘Hitler… He is the one who brought us to this pitiful state, isn’t he?’ Shocked, the lieutenant releases him at once. The man reaches the door, then turns to the lieutenant and asks him: ‘Excuse me, Sir, but who exactly did you think I was cursing?’ The bottom line: people started to have guts. As for the sense of humor, they had never lost it.

In the Bucharest cinemas an American film was a very rare thing. When they did run such a film, it was only to show the racism in the US or the ‘fight for peace’ or the poverty in some God-forsaken places in the desert or the mountains. However, Bucharest was full of videotapes brought by various people from abroad. It wasn’t illegal, but it wasn’t done in broad daylight either. Without this circuit being clandestine, it had a certain touch of discretion. In the latter half of the 1980s the Bulgarian television became the ‘new fashion’ in Bucharest. People, us included, would install special antennas, persistently trying to catch an American or European show or film or a concert. The Bulgarians also had a second channel, specialized in culture. This is where I watched – among other things – Verdi’s ‘Requiem’ sung by Mirela Freni and her husband, Nicolae Ghiaurov, as well as ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ performed by Alexis Weissenberg, my former fellow-student from Jerusalem, whom I hadn’t heard of for over 40 years. The Bulgarian television had become so popular, that certain apartment houses posted its weekly program at the entrance. The inhabitants of Timisoara caught the Yugoslav and Hungarian TV stations; in Iasi they caught the television from Chisinau; Oradea caught the Budapest television and so on and so forth.