Seite 308 [308]
OCR
I. LATIN AMERICA COMPOSITION OF AN IDENTITY. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS. FIGURATIVE SYNTHESIS OF A JEWISH PERSON: ROMANIA THE NATION; HUNGARY THE LANGUAGE; FRANCE THE CULTURE; ARGENTINA THE HOME —o TomAs ABRAHAM Keywords: figurative synthesis of a Jewish person; Romania the Nation; Hungary the language; France the Culture; Argentina the home It’s not easy being Jewish in Argentina, but it was much more difficult being a Jew in Romania and Hungary; not only difficult but impossible. My mother and I were born in Timisoara, my father in Sighisoara. She has Serbian features, my father, a more Germanic appearance. They were bilingual; they spoke Hungarian and German, although I never heard them speak Romanian. According to a family story, the first word I said was “bonat” (vonat), which means “train” in Hungarian. A word, which with an irony of questionable taste, exemplifies what happened to my people in Europe during the Second World War. By one of those miracles of life or fate, my parents, who lived in Timisoara, survived the genocide. The trains that transported the Jews were stationed, so I was told, forty kilometers from the city center. My father was sent into forced labor, and both my parents had to submit to the segregation imposed by the authorities which restricted their movement and banned them from entering certain areas. They were separated from the rest of their countrymen, but survived. + 307 +
