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In the first half of the last century it was a fashion that craftsmen went to Bucharest. Romania was underdeveloped, there wasn’t anything, and craftsmen, whoever was capable, flocked to Romania from here [from Transylvania].
Szatmari was a famous photographer, he went to Bucharest at that time [at the beginning of the 20thcentury], and he made a big fortune there. If we find Romanians with Hungarian names, you can be sure that their great-grandparents went there from here, as Hungarians, because they could earn well.
They introduced this and that. People didn’t buy shoes from the shop, they could do that, but most of them wanted to have shoes, which suited their feet perfectly. There were fashion magazines, so they could choose the model they liked, and they had that made.
That’s how my grandmother got to Bucharest as well. She was already a widow [a divorced woman] – she divorced the handsome Klein she had got married to for the second time – when she left, but she was a great cook, and she had a small, homely, kosher eating-house in Bucharest, it went well. It wasn’t a restaurant, just a small hash-house.
Szatmari was a famous photographer, he went to Bucharest at that time [at the beginning of the 20thcentury], and he made a big fortune there. If we find Romanians with Hungarian names, you can be sure that their great-grandparents went there from here, as Hungarians, because they could earn well.
They introduced this and that. People didn’t buy shoes from the shop, they could do that, but most of them wanted to have shoes, which suited their feet perfectly. There were fashion magazines, so they could choose the model they liked, and they had that made.
That’s how my grandmother got to Bucharest as well. She was already a widow [a divorced woman] – she divorced the handsome Klein she had got married to for the second time – when she left, but she was a great cook, and she had a small, homely, kosher eating-house in Bucharest, it went well. It wasn’t a restaurant, just a small hash-house.
Period
Location
Bucharest
Romania
Interview
Alice Kosa