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2-Religious Family Life

What were some of your religious traditions?

I would say that at that time everybody was observant. Everybody was very religious. Everybody kept kosher and if somebody wouldn't keep kosher in the community they were just excluded from the social life. My father he was very religious but a little modernized if you see his picture he never had payos, he never had a strimely, he had a very little beard but always wore the cipa and the hat. And he read always the newspapers in Hungarian. He didn't know too much Romanian. He had been a soldier in First World War. Then he had gone to some yeshiva. In the yeshiva he learned German and Hungarian. So he was also enlightened, modern. This is how he allowed me to go to school. But there was no question about observance, I mean about the holidays. He went to a small synagogue. He was a Hassid of the Vizhnitz. He didn't go to a big town because there were many temples and synagogues in my hometown. This was a small shul, a little different, the Vizhnitz Hassidim. As I told you we all kept kosher. My mother when she married she had to cut her hair and had a wig. But, later on she grew her hair but she always wore a little kerchief. When the Shabbat came she had to put on her wig when she went to the temple. So it was a little more modern than the others.

I do remember a very funny event. I went to visit my cousins, my aunt, and it was Yom Kippur. And obviously we were all fasting. And they had the orchard, and we walked in the orchard and I found some green nuts, walnuts. I picked up one and i started to eat the walnut and this was when I remembered: It is Yom Kippur! And i spit it out, but i had the feeling I had already sinned. It bothered me very much.

Was your mother treated differently by the women around her?

No. Well some of her sisters also wore their own hair, and some were more religious, there were different shades. No she was not treated differently. When my mother married my father, there were big questions why a young girl who is pretty, blonde, so and so forth would marry a widower with three boys. I did have an older cousin who is now ninety years old in Israel and who is writing his memoirs. He writes about my father. He says exactly this story, how everybody was wondering why, a twenty-one year old girl would marry him. But then it turns out that he was the nicest husband, a very good, very read, very interesting in the sense. My father was always a story-teller and this is how he wrote his book. So he was a very good husband, a very good father.

Many many years later I was living in New York. I was writing my book and one rabbi from Queens called me and he said, "You know something I knew your father, I'm from Sighet." And I said, "What did you know about my father?" He said "Well, I was a teenager and on a Saturday afternoon the boys called me "let's go" because Mr. Apsan is going to be in the synagogue and reading his stories." This is how I learned my father was telling stories to the young boys.

Why did your mom decide to wear a wig? What type of wigs?

No, there was no way without a wig. All the Jewish women had to wear wigs. I have another story about the wigs. One of my mother's sisters immigrated to America, sometime in 1919 or 20. She had been married before. I think it must have been a relative. The Sapinka rabbi—Sapinsa was the place where my maternal grandparents lived and they had their own rabbi. My grandfather was from that rabbinical family, so she married someone, the son of the rabbi. I don't know what happened. But she was very unhappy and she got a get. The idea that she got a get must have been a very serious problem. Anyway, after she got a get—she was the oldest of my grandparents eleven children—after she got the get, she realized she would not be able to marry anymore, ever. So she went. She left and she immigrated to America. In America she did very well in New York. She remarried, she had her two daughters.

I must have been ten years old when this Aunt Fanny came to visit and it was a big event. The Aunt from America was coming to visit, and the presents she's bringing... She came up with two girls. One girl was one year older than I was, her name was Sylvia. Maybe this is how I got my name for my daughter Sylvia. She was eleven, I was ten and the another little girl was Tootsy. By then when she came she was a very modern woman, but she had her wig. Sure, we talked about her coming for a long time. It was a big event. When they came and they were so beautifully dressed, and we so wear their clothes, (they get was fantastic). The little girl of six was so pretty. Her mother everyday would make her curls, just like Shirley Temple. So there was a fair in my hometown, in the park. There was a beauty contest for little girls. My brothers bought all the tickets for Tootsy. So Tootsy became Ms. Sighet at the age of six. She's talking about that.

So Aunt Fanny, as I told you about her wig. She always wore a kerchief, but not anymore in America. She had her own hair. But it was a Friday, and they were still in the village of grandparents, Sapinsa. I remember that I was also there and they sent me to pick up the wig from the beauty parlor. They had to comb and to fashion the wig. I picked up the wig—it was put in a brown wrap—and I crossed the bridge over this little creek called Sapinsa to go to my grandfather's place. I was singing. I don't know what I did. I arrived and the bag was empty. I was so scared what happened to that wig on the bridge. I ran back and I found the wig at the edge of the bridge. I was so relieved. Imagine if the wig would have fallen in that water and would have been taken right with the river to the other rivers. So this is the story of Aunt Fanny. But she was a modern woman, but very religious, very observant.

Can you talk about what kinds of religious advice you got from your mother?

No I did not get religious advice. I just know one thing: that my mother hoped that at the beginning that I would be a good dressmaker. Then, six years later I went to take a sewing course at Sees, you know the story?

You told that story. Great story.

Are you familiar with that yet?

You talked about how your father wrote a book. What was the book about?

Well the father was also called, later on, the Shadamalehem from Sighet, because he wrote about the Jews, the very poor Jewish peasants and Jewish villagers. How they worked and how, when the holidays came, they all took trains to go to pilgrimage to the rabbi. This is why he writes about the rabbi, and the rabbi (dynasties) by the pool, the men, who went right? So each one has a little story about the Jews in one of the villages.

Bittersweet stories, like one story was how one of the guys had a carriage. He had his own. He had a horse. He was helping carrying. I mean this is his living. .. a horse with a carriage. He always hoped that his son would go to school and to Yeshiva. Then one day he fell ill and he died, and there is no one to carry his job. So they took the twelve year old boy and harnessed him to the horse to continue his father's job. This is one of the very sad stories.

Another one story was how people in his village, they went all to synagogues on Friday nights and Saturday. But the weekdays, there was not always enough people for the (minion) for the ten people right? So they were only nine, and then needed a tenth Jew. So one of the guys went out in the city to find a Jewish person. He came, an the old man with a beard and a hat and (guard) and he signed as him to come in and to help the minion. It turned out that he was a priest. So he came in and he made ... He didn't say no, but he helped out to do a minion. So these are the type of stories about people, and the hardship, and their work, and their poverty, and the children suffering.

Who influenced you the most in your childhood?

Well, I think that the whole tradition of Jewishness, it had a great influence on me more so because, after the War when I came back, there was no more. I didn't live anymore in Sighet, or in the villages, I didn't see Jewish life, I didn't hear speaking Yiddish. Even my children say "You never told us the big traditions that you got at home." They were very, very, very nice, but probably because they ended when I was twenty two. This is the end of tradition, the end of my Yiddish Jewish life.