Re: [Cz-L] Re: czernowitz-l digest: May 26, 2011

Thanks, Hardy and Berti -
 
Along with hearing loss, I guess I've had some memory loss, too.  But knowing my mother, who would have been about twelve when the Romanians took Bukovina, she would have made an effort to master Romanian. I remember clearly when we settled in Canada, she laid down the rule for both dad and myself that we would speak only English in the house.  They had had English lessons back in Cz but I knew only a few words.  Because of her insistence on speaking English in the house, within five years I was acting in theatre and on the radio without an accent. 
 
For some reason dad would never teach me Hungarian.  That was his private language.  But mother learned some and I picked some up just listening to him with his Hungarian friends.  Hungarian Jews, I've come to the conclusion, are pretty goyish.
 
But we probably spoke mostly German at home.  This would account for the fact that I can still read in German and not in Romanian.  I thought that I had been equally fluent in both languages but today I remember even more French from my French lessons than Romanian.  In fact, when I first heard Romanian after not hearing it for many years, it sounded very foreign and not Latinish at all when compared to Italian or Spanish.
 
Dad was from Arad and spoke only Hungarian.  In the  army he had to learn German.  The Russians took him prisoner so he spent several years in Siberia and had to learn Russian. Baron von Neumann's textile mills in Transylvania hired him and sent him to Cz as a representative to cover Bukovina and Bessarabia because he had German and Russian (all with a Hungarian accent) Of course, in Cz he had to learn Romanian, too.
 
I wonder, though, how much German the Romanians in Cz knew.  Dad had a Romanian friend from Cz or Romania, named Moshoiu or some such name.  They both had worked for the Baron and, as a matter of fact, Moshoiu looked after the Baron's real estate interests in Canada.  When they got together they would speak English but also German.  Moshoiu's wife was Swiss so he would have had to learn German.  
 
I guess that right through to the time the Russians took over and started importing and exporting people, the official language in Cz might have been ruled to be Romanian but in reality, German remained the main language for all, including the resident Romanians and Ruthenians, etc.
 
Hardy, you mentioned if parents had immigrated to Cz and that got me wondering if anyone in the List has done a genealogical search on their ancestors?  My grandmother's people, the Hermanns, as far as I know, go back a couple of generations and my grandfather's people, Todres, also go back a couple of generations.  I was told that his ancestors had come from Spain, possibly during the Inquisition.  Has anyone had any luck tracing ancestors out of Cz? 

Columbus had a Jewish translator named Torres and when I read about him I got excited thinking he might be an ancestor. Torres in Spain could become Todres in Austria. Well, I did more search on Torres and he settled in the New World in that early colonial period. But it would be interesting to find out how and when Jews settled in Austria and Bukovina and Romania.

Berti, I have a class picture from Scoala Elite with Freulein Deutch, tall, thin and nervous looking, and our French teacher who had white hair and big eyes. Do your happen to remember the name of the principal? A big man with a bald head. And the textbooks, I guess, were all in Romanian.

All very interesting.

Onward.
andy

--- On Sat, 5/28/11, HARDY BREIER <HARDY3_at_BEZEQINT.NET> wrote:

From: HARDY BREIER <HARDY3_at_BEZEQINT.NET>
Subject: Re: [Cz-L] Re: czernowitz-l digest: May 26, 2011
To: "andy halmay" <andy_venivici_at_yahoo.com>, "Czernowitz Genealogy and History" <czernowitz-l_at_list.cornell.edu>
Date: Saturday, May 28, 2011, 12:15 AM

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 12:07:46