Tivadar Foldes

My is my father Tivadar Foldes in Budapest in the 1920s. On the back of the picture you can see the stamp of the Secretariat of the English-Hungarian Bank, so the photo must have been used for some office ID or something like that. My father graduated from high school at the age of 18 and entered the English-Hungarian Bank. He magyarized his name from Friedman to Foldes when he entered the bank in Fiume. This was about 1912. He wasn't expected to, he just did. Probably because it sounded better in the bank. He worked there until the war broke out in 1914. Then, or sometime afterwards, he went to Pest to avoid being called up and from then on he was here at the English-Hungarian Bank. A few years after he married my mother - which was in 1927 - he entered a subsidiary of the bank as a chartered accountant. In the second half of the 1930s chartered accountancy meant taking an exam. He had a certificate in it. My parents got married in 1927 after my grandfather Ignac's death. They got married in Rakospalota, I don't know why. I have the marriage certificate and it says that the civil marriage took place in Rakospalota. They married before a rabbi, Benjamin Schwartz, in Bethlen Square in Budapest, as Istvan Road - where my grandfather and my father lived - was part of its district they went there. They lived all their life in a rented apartment and apart from the apartment I live in now, I have, too. Before I was born they lived on 82 Kiraly Street. There were two rooms there and the windows looked onto Csengery Street. Then they moved to Liszt Ferenc Square because there was trouble because next to the house was an inn, the drunks misbehaved and my parents poured buckets of water on them. I was born on 4 Liszt Ferenc Square. It was a smaller apartment and my father thought, as did my paternal grandfather, that a bigger one was necessary and he looked at one in the area. He was offered one on 6 Terez Boulevard, where no one had lived for months because a prostitute had lived in it who had been strangled by her boyfriend, so people didn't want to move in. My mother and father weren't so bothered by this and they got it cheaply. They moved there in 1934. It had five rooms, my mother's dental surgery was there, a waiting room and two hallways.