She’s younger and livelier: still proud, vain and coquettish.

She was very beautiful in her youth and she knew it. The glory of that time still remains in her clear blue eyes, along with a rather proud and mischievous glint.

She wears a hat of straw and silk, tries a dress on three times and tells the seamstress what she needs done. She frequently checks herself in the mirror and gives herself just a touch of powder when nobody is looking. As Grandfather was a watchmaker and jeweller, she has held on to big diamond earrings, a gold chain and a ruby bracelet from their time together.

She wears them all with an air of importance, clearly flattered at the memory of having been a beautiful woman.

Grandmother, on the other hand, has entered old age resigned to everything, without regrets or lingering vanity. For as long as I have known her, she has had the same simple, decorous black dress with ordinary buttons of bone. White-haired, tired, calm – she’s a storybook grandmother. She speaks the rough country-Romanian of a Muntenian village. She was born here, in this town, in the period of the Russian protectorate and has lived her long life in this county. For years her father worked on an estate in Gropeni, managing the accounts, and later her husband, my paternal grandfather, worked in the port. She has lived in the company of the Danube. When I ask, and have time to listen, she tells of the wonders of the past century, about the city and the townsfolk, and about high society in those years. In particular, she talks about a ball, her first, which must have been a sensation in the life of the town. From a few details she has given me, I suppose it was in 1848, perhaps around the time of the Proclamation of Islaz. And so history and the chronicles of my family are intertwined.

There are some very strange aspects to our family tree. On father’s side, there is at least a century of Romanian life, in town and country, living alongside Romanian neighbours, working with them, mingling with them. For how many tens of years we were here before, or how many hundreds, living as an isolated community, I do not know. But my great-grandfather’s name appears clearly in the census of 1828. Certainly, we cannot speak of a process of assimilation, but I sense a certain resilience in this branch of my family, which must have something to do with the Danube since four consecutive generations have grown up beside it. That great-grandfather of 1828 – Mendel of Gropeni, as he was called – spoke and wrote Romanian, wore boots and a traditional Romanian waistcoat. As for my grandfather, I can still remember his strange look of a boatman when he returned in the evening from the docks. He wore heavy metal-studded boots, his hands were calloused, and he would be white from head to toe from the sacks of wheat and corn which he breathed his whole life, fourteen hours a day, from dawn to dusk. There was something rough and ready about him: something of a boatman, a cart-driver, a day-labourer. On the evenings of holy festivals he also read from some immense Hebrew books, but didn’t read with the same trembling passion I sensed in the other grandfather, Mother’s father. One was an intellectual, the other not, though he too was – they say – well read.

He lived in the fresh air, exposed to the wind, his feet upon rock and earth, gazing at a horizon saturated by pools of water, raising his voice above the rushing river, the sirens of the boats, the rattling of the hoists. A man of the Danube.

Mother’s family, on the other hand, didn’t leave the ghetto until much later. From Bukovina and northern Moldova, they were all people who lived indoors, in lamplight, over books. They have always lived close to the synagogue. From there perhaps they get their black eyes, their long thin hands, the pallor of their cheeks. Their delicate, easily disturbed constitutions are sustained more by their nerves than by bodily strength.

Bad news or a sleepless night or a tense wait devastates them immediately: black circles around the eyes, pale lips, hot cheeks. The toughness of Father’s family seems like coarseness alongside this peculiar glasshouse sensitivity. This explains perhaps the deaf incomprehension that has always divided them, the reckless from the delicate. What’s vigour to one side is boorishness to the other.