Tag #136213 - Interview #78490 (Katalin Kallos Havas)

We spoke Hungarian in the family. Our mother tongue and culture was Hungarian. Neither of our parents spoke Yiddish. We had a large library at home. My parents read a lot, but it wasn’t them who led me to read. I just had the bookshelf there, so I read. We didn’t have any religious books, but literature. I learned German when I was three from the Fraulein, who was a Saxon girl from the Brasso region, and I knew Gothic characters at the age of seven. Now I know only a few of them. At the age of seven I could already read and write in Hungarian. From the age of 11 I read regularly, and at 13 I was already reading Zola.