Juci Scheiner and Vera Szanto

This is a picture of me, on the left, and Vera Szanto, Vicu, on the right, in 1924 in Marosvasarhely.

Vicu was a very good and kind girl. She was the niece of Mr. Szanto, the Jewish lawyer. She wasn?t from Marosvasarhely, but from some village, and she stayed with some relatives of hers on Jokai Street.

We were wearing French dresses and performed a French dance. I think our dresses were made of paper, I know we had to be very careful with them. I don?t remember what ball it was, but at this ball we, the little girls, gave a performance. Of course, after we finished, our parents packed us up and took us home.

The ball season started in fall, and every Saturday they organized a ball in the main hall of the Palace of Culture. It began with a performance on the stage, then the chairs were pushed aside so that there was room to dance. I performed many times and in many places. We had a Jewish ball, a civic ball, a Kata Bethlen ball. [Kata Bethlen was an 18th century countess and writer in Transylvania.] We organized Jozsef Kiss evenings, where everyone had to show up wearing the Hungarian gala-dress. Jozsef Kiss was a poet, but I haven't heard of him ever since. When I first attended the Jozsef Kiss evening I was a fairly big girl, and they let me dance a few times, then sent me home with a servant. The parents stayed there for as long as they liked. There was the Maros ball in the Maros restaurant, and it was imperative for my parents to attend it. Everyone was invited.

When I was a big girl and the college years began, there were students who made money playing music, and formed bands. For instance, there was the Young Boy Band from Kolozsvar, made up only of upper-class students. On the main square, where the cinema called Pitik would later be, during the communist era, was a Jewish cinema in the interwar period. Everyone knew it as the Jewish cinema, probably because it was owned by a Jew. They also organized evening parties and performances there: singing, poetry readings and other performances.