Selected text
And I never felt a certain attitude towards me being a Jew, even when I went to the Bulgarian high school. They liked us very much and knew that we had been prepared well in the Jewish school.
I recall that when my friend Liska Natan and I went to the school yard on the first school day there were all the students from the fourth grades, which we were supposed to join, standing in rows and I heard some voices saying, ‘I hope they won’t be in our class because they are very good students, very serious competition.’ That was the reason they didn’t want us. So they didn’t know anything about us, they had seen us but that didn’t mean that they had a different attitude towards us. On the contrary, very soon both teachers and students started liking us. There were two of us, Jews, in the class; the rest of my classmates went to other classes or to vocational schools of economics.
I started liking some subjects and teachers more here at high school. I can’t say that at elementary school I had developed a special liking for any of the subjects. But at high school I used to like Chemistry, Natural Science. In the sixth grade we studied Psychology, in the seventh, Logics, in the eighth, Ethics. They were part of our training in Philosophy. I was keen on it because it was the subject that could explain the world and provide answers to my questions. And additionally, those subjects gave you the chance to analyze things and didn’t give us ready-made answers. Just the opposite, they gave you the chance to analyze different things in a variety of ways. That appeals to children very much: you find the answer to your personal ‘why.’ I had a favorite teacher: my class teacher whose subject was Chemistry.
The principal, Hadzhitodorov, liked me very much, too, maybe because he taught Psychology, Logics and Ethics. Our Literature teacher liked me very much, too. Just imagine the situation: I’m in the fourth grade, into the classroom comes the Literature teacher, Lyuba Voivodova, known by the whole of Pazardzhik. She gave us the following task, ‘For the next time I want you to write down an essay entitled ‘Sweet Grapes,’ or ‘A September Night in Pazarzdhik.’ That was how they taught us, not by following patterns and clichés. And during the lesson, I probably made an impression, a little girl with glowing and intelligent eyes. ‘Who wants to read?’ and I raised my hand immediately and said ‘I, I…’ ‘Ok, the girl in the red blouse.’ At that time we still didn’t have uniforms. And I started liking this teacher right away because she accepted me, because she praised me for the nice, sensual way in which I had described the grapes, with the little drops of dew on every grape, how I imagined how it melted on the tongue and it felt as if a bee had brought her a drop of honey. And afterwards not only the teachers started accepting me but the students as well.
In high school I made friends with Bulgarians for the first time. It happened like that. I sat at the same desk with the girls but I don’t think we spent our free time together, by visiting each other or anything like that. Those were our contacts. I went to one of them to take the translation in Latin, later she came to me to take the essays in French and that was how we started sharing our lives, we had things to talk about but we didn’t meet after school, didn’t visit each other. We became closer after a trip to the Bachkovski cloister, which was organized by the school. There we felt more at ease. Our teachers even said that they had started knowing us better since that trip.
We visited each other more after finishing high school. Later, during the Holocaust we weren’t allowed to continue our education whereas my Bulgarian classmates went to university [23]. And do you know what a tragedy that was for me? After the first semester, after they returned from Sofia and started telling stories about their life as students. That was a dream for us – to go to university, but we could only listen to them and our hearts bled.
I recall that when my friend Liska Natan and I went to the school yard on the first school day there were all the students from the fourth grades, which we were supposed to join, standing in rows and I heard some voices saying, ‘I hope they won’t be in our class because they are very good students, very serious competition.’ That was the reason they didn’t want us. So they didn’t know anything about us, they had seen us but that didn’t mean that they had a different attitude towards us. On the contrary, very soon both teachers and students started liking us. There were two of us, Jews, in the class; the rest of my classmates went to other classes or to vocational schools of economics.
I started liking some subjects and teachers more here at high school. I can’t say that at elementary school I had developed a special liking for any of the subjects. But at high school I used to like Chemistry, Natural Science. In the sixth grade we studied Psychology, in the seventh, Logics, in the eighth, Ethics. They were part of our training in Philosophy. I was keen on it because it was the subject that could explain the world and provide answers to my questions. And additionally, those subjects gave you the chance to analyze things and didn’t give us ready-made answers. Just the opposite, they gave you the chance to analyze different things in a variety of ways. That appeals to children very much: you find the answer to your personal ‘why.’ I had a favorite teacher: my class teacher whose subject was Chemistry.
The principal, Hadzhitodorov, liked me very much, too, maybe because he taught Psychology, Logics and Ethics. Our Literature teacher liked me very much, too. Just imagine the situation: I’m in the fourth grade, into the classroom comes the Literature teacher, Lyuba Voivodova, known by the whole of Pazardzhik. She gave us the following task, ‘For the next time I want you to write down an essay entitled ‘Sweet Grapes,’ or ‘A September Night in Pazarzdhik.’ That was how they taught us, not by following patterns and clichés. And during the lesson, I probably made an impression, a little girl with glowing and intelligent eyes. ‘Who wants to read?’ and I raised my hand immediately and said ‘I, I…’ ‘Ok, the girl in the red blouse.’ At that time we still didn’t have uniforms. And I started liking this teacher right away because she accepted me, because she praised me for the nice, sensual way in which I had described the grapes, with the little drops of dew on every grape, how I imagined how it melted on the tongue and it felt as if a bee had brought her a drop of honey. And afterwards not only the teachers started accepting me but the students as well.
In high school I made friends with Bulgarians for the first time. It happened like that. I sat at the same desk with the girls but I don’t think we spent our free time together, by visiting each other or anything like that. Those were our contacts. I went to one of them to take the translation in Latin, later she came to me to take the essays in French and that was how we started sharing our lives, we had things to talk about but we didn’t meet after school, didn’t visit each other. We became closer after a trip to the Bachkovski cloister, which was organized by the school. There we felt more at ease. Our teachers even said that they had started knowing us better since that trip.
We visited each other more after finishing high school. Later, during the Holocaust we weren’t allowed to continue our education whereas my Bulgarian classmates went to university [23]. And do you know what a tragedy that was for me? After the first semester, after they returned from Sofia and started telling stories about their life as students. That was a dream for us – to go to university, but we could only listen to them and our hearts bled.
Period
Location
Pazardzhik
Bulgaria
Interview
Sofi Eshua Danon-Moshe