Tag #138754 - Interview #78554 (Jozsef Faludi)

We lived in a long, thatched, mud-walled house. The rooms were one after the other. The floor in the “big room” – our parents’ room – was made of thick boards. There were two beds in it, and a couch where I slept because I was the first-born boy. We never heated the room, we just slept there. Then there was the so-called hall where my little sisters slept. We were there the most. That’s where we ate too. And then there was the kitchen. We had a “sitting-bath” that we would put up in the kitchen and we’d heat water up in it once a week. Besides that we went to the mikva, where we could bathe on Fridays. There was a pump-well in the yard, and there was a shadoof in front of the house beyond the fence. (Typical of the Hortobagy region of Hungary, the shadoof is a well with a large counterweighted lever for drawing the water.) At first we lit the house with petroleum lamps, then later with electricity. I don’t know exactly when they brought in the electricity, but we were already big by then.

Around the house was a garden where we grew vegetables. There was also more garden and a vine arbor in the yard. We had a big wooden shed with a tile roof, where we did the washing, especially in the winter when we couldn’t do it in the yard. We had a washer-woman come for the washing, who would wash with my mother.