Tag #135855 - Interview #78511 (Vasile Grunea)

My grandmother was very religious, but she didn’t force her religiosity on anyone else. She came to us and noticed that we didn’t have a separate salt-cellar for meat and diary dishes. When you have a meat dish, you have to put one salt-cellar on the table and when you have diary dishes you have to use another one. For example, if one had potato soup with milk, one had to put salt in it from the salt-cellar for diary dishes. We didn’t have a separate salt-cellar for this in Brasso. My mother told me later that my grandmother had noticed this but she didn’t want to insult my mother, so she sent the servant to buy one and told her: ‘Go tell the mistress that you broke the salt-cellar and have to go and buy a new one’. And she didn’t say to my mother, ‘How come, my daughter, that you don’t have a salt-cellar for diary dishes!?’ My mother told me another story: my grandmother was sitting in the garden in Haifa – there was a nice flower garden in front of the house, I saw it later, too – and a missionary came into the yard. She welcomed him, offered him coffee or tea and said, ‘I respect your religion, I ask you to respect mine, too; we can talk about anything you want, but let’s not talk about religion. Everybody should stay with the religion they were born with.