When I was a couple months old, I was baptized in the Christian Orthodox church. This was much to the dismay of my grandmother Dunda, who had been mistrustful of clergy ever since a grade school confessor had betrayed her confidence and publicized her confession to having cheated on a test. Not only that, but she was also a germaphobe, and Orthodox baptism requires that the baby be dunked thrice in a vessel of holy water. Holy or not, the baptismal pool was certainly unsanitary, and my grandmother was determined that none of the other new Christians’ germs would stick to me, so she slathered me in petroleum jelly. When the priest picked me up, he couldn’t get a good grip, and almost dropped me in the water. The commotion roused me from my baby sleep, and I both became purple with rage and also unleashed a torrent of urine on the priest’s vestments. While the rest of my family rushed to make their way out of church, my grandmother chuckled with satisfaction.
It was early spring, 1983. Romania had been a Communist country for close to 40 years, officially secular, dedicated to stamping out “obscurantism and superstition” and replacing them with “scientific historical materialism.” While most Romanians had privately continued to hold on to a degree of faith, observance, and certainly superstition, religious life was severely constrained. People could come to church for the important personal sacraments (baptisms, weddings, burials), but services were small and furtive. While not exactly dangerous, stepping into church was uncomfortable, slightly uncouth, “not done” though widely accepted. It required a certain degree of conviction.
Which is why my family’s choice to have me baptized would have appeared completely befuddling to anyone who knew them. Going back at least a couple generations on either side, I don’t think my family would have been able to point to anyone with genuine religious conviction.
My mother’s family were small-town Ashkenazi Jews. Originally hailing from Carpathian Ruthenia, the mountainous area spanning Northeastern Romania and Southern Ukraine, my mom’s maternal side, by the name of Saim, moved South to Ploiesti early in the 20th century. There, they became successful during the oil boom of the 1930s, catering to the interests and disposable incomes of an emerging middle class.
The Saims had a popular “Fashion House” (Casa de Moda) where both my great-grandfather Benes and my great-grandmother Etla worked; she drew the designs, and he cut them. At the height of their success, they employed more than two dozen “girls” (seamstresses). Their four children were enrolled in good schools, had nannies, and would take weekends off to gamble at the Casino in Sinaia, then the hottest mountain resort in the Bucharest orbit. In the 1930s, Ploiesti was roughly 5% Jewish. By comparison, this is similar to Los Angeles today, which ranks as the second largest concentration of Jews in the world outside of Israel (New York is first at 13%).
My mother’s paternal side, named Peters, has a darker and more mysterious history. My mom’s paternal grandfather had immigrated from Austria at the turn of the 20th century, a Catholic convert. In spite of his papered Christianity, he settled in Iasi which, with Jews making up more than 40% of the population, was then the center of the Yiddish-speaking world. An intellectual, professorial type, “Grandpa Max” had trouble putting enough food on the table for his six children, so he sent my mom’s dad Jacques and one of his sisters away in the care of a wealthier relation in the South.
My dad’s people hail from decidedly more diverse stock. My grandfather Eugen, whose mother was Turkish, was barely out of middle school when his Romanian father left the family and skipped town with his mistress. To support his mother and sister, my grandfather enlisted in the Army. A promising young man, he obtained a scholarship to Lazar high school, then (as well as now) one of Bucharest’s finest, where he walked the beautiful neoclassical hallways alongside Romania’s ill-fated boy-king, Mihai I. My grandfather’s only comment on his illustrious classmate was, “He was a nice boy. Nobody treated him any different.”
And then, when he was barely 18, the War started. In 1945, having recovered from a shrapnel wound to his shin, he found himself garrisoned with his anti-aircraft battery in the little village of Pecica in NW Romania, on the outskirts of the former Austro-Hungarian empire. It was there that he met my bubbly, young grandmother. She was, in her own telling, instantly mesmerized by his “unusual, grey-colored eyes,” versions of which passed on to my father, myself, and my eldest daughter, in spite of the supposedly dominant brown allele being present in each generation.
While my grandfather was the poor son of a philandering father, my grandmother, imposingly named Gheorghina Aglae Edita though she always went by her baby nickname Dunda, was the daughter of a solid, respectable Imperial family. Her parents were in what we might today call a mixed marriage: dad was Orthodox and mom was Catholic. My grandmother and her older sister Iris viewed this as a great advantage: “Oh, we loved it! We got twice the holidays, twice the presents and twice the school breaks.”
This was not unusual. My grandmother’s family lived just north of Timisoara in the Banat region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the general area speckled on the map above with red, orange, green and tan. In my grandmother’s telling, this was a prized feature: it meant access to a number of traditions, particularly of the culinary kind, which she continued to appreciate for the rest of her life. And culinary exchanges between “races” happened regardless of official, or accepted norms.
My dad tells a story about a type of interfaith exchange that would have raised serious eyebrows, but that the parties involved found sufficiently valuable to brave potential opprobrium. My grandmother’s family had Hungarian Jewish neighbors who also liked to eat. Sadly, the laws of Kashrut prevented them from enjoying some of the delicacies that the local gentiles had become adept at preparing -- such as crispy pork cracklings. So, the neighboring families made use of the narrow, unlit roads of the village to exchange Kosher for un-Kosher fat under the cover of darkness: a paper parcel of goose fat cracklings (gribbenes) for a paper parcel of pork fat cracklings (jumari).
The Jewish side of my family also had their share of interfaith dialogue, both virtuous and sinful, and both in happy times and sad.
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More in Part II.