Tag #122612 - Interview #78508 (Mayer Rafael Alhalel)

My father served the Pinkas family for forty years. They were one of the richest Jewish families in Vidin, famous corn-dealers [they owned grain and traded it]. The Pascin [originally Pinkas] family was an old Jewish family from Ruse. I don’t know when they moved to Vidin and why. All I know is that they were a number of brothers. One of them was my father’s boss. The father of Jules Pascin [5] was his younger brother. They were middlemen: they bought corn, rice, maize and sunflower from the villagers living in the nearby villages and sold it to the mills in Vidin. They also exported barges of corn, but I don’t know to where. So, they had a stable business, importing and exporting grain. At that time everyone in town and the nearby villages knew my father, because he could speak fluent Wallachian and Turkish. [Wallachian is a neo-Latin language, closest to Romanian. Wallachians are scattered around in South-Eastern Europe, many of them live in the villages by the Danube, near Vidin.] He was something like a distributor of food products. He bought corn, maize, millet from the villagers and sold it in town.