Pessa and Moses Blumenfeld

These here are my parents, Moses Blumenfeld and Pessa Blumenfeld, nee Rosenblum. The photo was taken in Botosani in the 1910s. My father was born in Botosani in 1878. He spoke Yiddish and Romanian. He worked as a bookkeeper for a mill - but not the one where my grandfather had worked. We had a good financial situation back then. After the anti-Jewish laws in Romania had been passed, he worked as a salesman and then as a high school secretary. My father was a kind man, who tried to spend as much time at home as he could. I don't remember him ever slapping me, and, as a matter of fact, he rarely intervened in the fights we, the kids, had. He married my mother in 1903. She was born in Botosani as well, in 1884. My mother knew Yiddish and Romanian. I'm not sure what kind of education she had, but she could read. I don't know if it was a shadkhan who brought them together, but I know that my parents had been neighbors before they got married. They married in the synagogue. My mother was a housewife, and she was pretty busy running the house, doing the shopping and taking care of my younger siblings. Although she had help in the house, there was still a lot to do. She was rather strict; she had to be because we, kids, often had squabbles. She intervened and sometimes took us by the ear and gave us a good talking-to. They both died in Botosani, my father in 1954 and my mother in 1960, and were buried in the Jewish cemetery.