Regarding language, and of course mamalige.
My father Salomon Wiznitzer, born in Waschkoutz am Cheremosh in 1910,
left "Romania" as a teenager, having only attended cheder and not
benefiting from the cosmopolitan education that Czernowitz afforded
its youth. Nevertheless, he eventually learned to do business
successfully in seven languages, including Japanese (my parents
survived WWII living from 1940 to 1946 as foreign neutrals in Kobe).
My father and his brothers usually conversed and corresponded with
each other in Yiddish. Though they seldom talked about their
childhood, whenever they mentioned Czernowitz, which my father
probably saw for the first time when the family fled the battles
raging along the Cheremosh in 1915, it was with great nostalgia.
Those references have contributed to my own affection for their
"Vienna of the East".
I don't know how much Romanian my father actually spoke, so I don't
count it as one of his languages. But he taught me one phrase from
his childhood that still gets a laugh from every Romanian I have met:
"Romania mare, mamaliga nare" = Romania is great, but there is no
polenta.*
* Romaina Mare is the nationalistic Greater Romania of the interwar
years and the jingoistic modern day claim to the Ukrainian Bukovina.
We ate mamalige country style with shmetene (sour cream) routinely
growing up in Curaçao, where it is considered a native staple and
called "funchi" (that I still make at home).
I was disappointed that the mamaliga I was served in Bukovina last
year was a soupy porridge, rather than a firm polenta.
2011/5/28 HARDY BREIER <HARDY3_at_bezeqint.net>
>
> Andy , your post has more questions than answers.
> Instead of illuminating it obscures.
> No, we did not speak any Rumanian at home.
> For the simple reason that we didnt know any.
> We ,the kids, could sustain a simple discussion in Rumanian with
> an impossible pronunciation. The parents not even this.
> If your parents immigrated to CZ, with a Rumanian background
> this can explain things differently.
> But this would be an exception to the rule.
> Yes, we switched to other languages whenever we needed vocabulary.
> It also depended to whom we spoke...
> We were always short of terms , as all the languages we spoke we knew
> very rudimentary.( our experts of the list will jump at this).,
> Hardy
>
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Received on 2011-05-28 09:15:34
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