Eva Barbulescu and Cleopatra Mociutchi

I took this photo in the 1960s here, in Iasi.

My wife, Cleopatra Mociutchi is on the left, on the right is Eva Sandor, now her name is Eva Barbulescu - she is my younger cousin, who now lives in France.

With Arnold Sandor, grandma's second husband - whom I loved a lot as well - my grandmother had two children:

Pal Sandor and Erzsebet Sandor, who were ten, respectively thirteen years younger than my father.

Pal Sandor was the elder; he was born in 1907 in Maramarossziget. They lived in Bucharest.

His wife was called Angela Rosenthal - we called her Angi -, she was from Temesvar.

My uncle's wife was an extremely intelligent woman, and they had an outstandingly wonderful family life.

I stayed at them in Bucharest sometimes even for weeks, and I saw them quarreling once - on who should do the dishes.

Everybody wanted to do the dishes. It's really funny…

First my uncle was a clerk, then he became a journalist at a Hungarian newspaper, at the 'Szakszervezeti Elet' [Trade Union Life].

This was the Hungarian edition of the 'Viata Sindicala', in those times it was published in Hungarian as well.

My aunt did the same: she was a clerk, then a journalist at the 'Romaniai Magyar Szo' [Paper of Hungarians from Romania] - back then it was called 'Elore'.

My uncle left for Israel at the age of almost eighty years - when his daughter, Eva moved to France - together with his wife, because it would have been quite difficult to stay in touch with his daughter during the Ceausescu era.

So he left for Israel quite late, and he died there in 1997, he was almost ninety.

They had their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary a few days before my uncle's death.

He always meant an example for me, they had a very nice marital life.

My aunt loved her husband very much; she didn't live much after his death.

We talked quite often on the phone, and I saw them too, because in 1992 I was in Israel; both were still alive.

I knew her husband was very ill. She said if Pali died, she would hang herself up. In short she loved him very much.

She didn't hang herself up, but she died soon after his death, she didn't live much after. She wasn't much younger than him, there was a difference of age of five years between them.

Their daughter, Eva Sandor was born in April 1940. Her name is Barbulescu after her husband.

Her husband is Christian, he was a lecturer or associate professor, something like that at the Faculty of Chemistry of the Technical University in Bucharest.

Eva was a physicist. She studied here, in Iasi - I brought her here, I was already a lecturer at the University of Iasi.

After she finished the university, she went back to Bucharest, and she was employed as a researcher by different institutions.

Later she took her doctorate in physics in Bucharest.

Of course she's retired too by now in France, because she defected to France with her husband a few years before Ceausescu's fall.

They have two children, who were born here, in Romania, so they left the country together.

The children were quite grown-up, when they emigrated. I've mentioned that her husband was called Barbulescu, the children have Romanian first names.

The boy is Virgil, his sister is Irina. Irina got married there to a French man, Virgil got married this summer [in 2007].

My wife kept her maiden name. Not in her first marriage, but after she divorced, she took back her maiden name, and we agreed that she would keep it.

We decided so mainly because we were working together, and thus everybody had their own name, otherwise people would confuse us. Her name is Mociutchi, it's a Polish name.

In fact one of her paternal great-grandfathers was Polish, he had fled the Russians; he got to Bessarabia, and got married there.

So this name comes from there. In turn her given name is Cleopatra, friends call her Pati.