Discovering my Romanian Past

The country my mother left in 1939 wasn't on my list of travel destinations -- nor was tracking down the home where she grew up -- until a wedding invitation arrived

Bucharest’s historic Solly Gold Building

My mother Nellie often spoke about the Bucharest apartment where she lived until her family immigrated to the United States in 1939. “Actually,” she mused less than a year before she died in 2019, “by any standards including probably today in the United States it was a fabulous place.”

She described a duplex art deco apartment with wraparound terraces and a staircase that wouldn’t have provoked surprise were Norma Desmond to swan down its steps in Sunset Boulevard.

On New Year’s Eve our friends Nancy and Bill told us that their daughter Isabel was marrying her Romanian fiancee in March and, remembering that my mother had been born in Romania, suggested we attend the wedding. It sounded like a crazy idea. But the more I thought about it the more it made sense. I’d heard my mother’s stories about her charmed Romanian childhood for years, I was working on a family memoir, and perhaps most persuasively, if I didn’t seize this opportunity to visit Romania I probably never would.

The country wasn’t near the top, or even in the middle, of places where I wanted to go. Japan certainly. Hawaii. Perhaps Patagonia. But it sounded like fun. Destination weddings have a momentum all their own. They exist in a liminal space. Sort of like a Robert Altman ensemble cast where everyone drifts from location to location talking over each other and clutching some sort of intoxicant.

Plus, we’d stop in Paris on the way home.

The wedding was in the countryside of Bukovina, a cultural and historical crossroads near the Ukrainian border. But we’d spend several days in the capital beforehand. My mother remembered the location of her home in the way children are taught to memorize their addresses. But a Google search came up blank. Fortunately, Peter, a Romanian friend who picked us up at the airport, had done his research. He told us the name of the street had been changed yet had no idea whether the building numbers corresponded to their pre-war counterparts.

On our first day in Romania, an auspiciously warm sunny day, I employed Peter’s reconnaissance to perform a Wikipedia search of the street’s post-war name. I’d found photographs of the interior of the apartment taken in the 1930’s among family photos but had no idea what the exterior looked like if, indeed, the building still existed. Wikipedia highlighted notable residences on the boulevard and their building numbers. One of them was called The Solly Gold Building.

My mother had spoken of Solly Gold. He was a wealthy young playboy, according to her, who’d built the home for himself and his new wife. But they quickly got divorced and my mother doubted he’d ever lived there before her family moved in. The year was 1934. His mother, a widow, had built a beautiful home for herself next door.

A family snapshot, circa 1934, of their living room

When I was going through my mother’s voluminous correspondence after she died I found letters to Nellie from Solly. He’d apparently returned to Romania after the war, if he’d ever left, and his family’s fortune had likely fallen victim to Romania’s post-war Communist regime. It seems that our family may have been helping him financially from the United States.

My mother had lived in the apartment for no more than two years. She and her younger sister were sent to boarding school in Switzerland and from there immigrated to the United States. Nellie was born in Chernovitz, a city in northern Romania where she spent the first ten years of her life and that’s now part of Ukraine and called Chernivtsi. We were within miles of it when we took a tour of the region’s famous painted churches the day before the wedding, even if my enthusiasm for family history didn’t extend to crossing the border and into a war zone.

I’d asked my mother whether she’d been exposed to anti-semitism when she lived in Romania? The question was triggered after she marveled that as perilous as life could be, especially with the rise of Nazism, including in Romania, she’d always lived in relative luxury.

However, she remembered a classmate, though not her name, that walked her home from school every day in Bucharest. I knew the name of the private school because I found her report cards but Peter, our Romanian friend, told us that it no longer exists. “She always wore a big cross because at that time in Romania it started also this anti-semitic movement,” my mother recalled. “When I think of it today I was totally unaware of all these things. I was perfectly happy as a child. But this classmate of mine must have realized what was going on, so she always walked me home from school. She probably wanted to make sure that nothing happened to me.”

The Solly Gold house was a mere twelve minute walk from our hotel. Bucharest has a certain vitality — the restaurants and coffee houses are buzzing and the average age of the population appears to be in their mid-twenties — but the city, with its occasionally rubbled sidewalks and graffiti defaced housing still bears the hangover from the Communist era. One of the top tourist attractions is the Ceausescu Villa, the lavish home of the former dictator who, along with his wife, were shot by firing squad in 1989. We took the tour and bought in the gift shop, if not the t-shirt, then a bust of the villain made out of soap.

The Solly Gold house remains a striking example of Modernist 1930’s architecture. It even bore an historical plaque explaining that it was designed by Marcel Iancu, one of the founding fathers of the Dadaist movement. The plaque said that the building’s interior elements remained, including, apparently that grand staircase in my family’s photos.

I rang the buzzer and a woman answered. When I asked whether she spoke English she hung up. I can’t say that I blame her. I wasn’t disappointed, though. It was remarkable that the apartment building still existed and that I’d found it. My mother never returned to Romania but expressed a desire to through her final years. She’d have been delighted to hear that I’d made the trip on her behalf.