Tag #125493 - Interview #97881 (Lina Franko)

My mother and father did not want to live in Ortakoy anymore. Ortakoy had started to become an outmoded neighborhood. The rich families had started moving to Sisli, and Nisantas. The year was 1953.  My mother and father sold the three houses which they owned. The shares of the siblings who lived in Paris and Israel were sent to them, because the house actually belonged to my grandmother. My husband proposed to rent a house in Nisantas with my mother and father. Everybody was pleased with this situation. Living in a single house would actually be more economical. My mother helped me with the raising of my children. My mother and I would put the money needed for the kitchen expenses in a purse. Everybody who bought something for the house would get his allowance from my mother. My mother was in charge of this purse, from which all the expenses were paid. My husband wouldn’t take extra money for the things he bought for the house, since we had children, and the old people did not eat so much. He would bring fruit home everynight from the street fruitsellers. He sometimes brought home ‚kasher‘ cheese, which was sold by the merchants coming from Anatolia. [‚Kasher‘ meaning Kosher, it refers to a specific brand of yellow cheese, produced by the Sephardim and was popular among both Jews and non-Jews.] My mother would immediately make borekas [Sephardic pastry filled with different kinds of fillings, either sweet or salty, like cheese, eggplants, potatoes or walnuts] and boyos [Sephardic pastry made of flour, oil and cheese] from that “kasher” cheese. My father on the other hand, would also sometimes want to buy things from the stallholders, but would usually get cheated because he was sick. And my mother would get angry at my father. I was very upset by these scenes. It was obvious that my father’s intention was good.

I would go to Beyoglu with my mother to buy the glassware we needed at home when some money was left in the purse from which our monthly expenses were paid. We especially couldn’t resist the crystal items. We would also go into the cloth shops to buy cloth to be made up by our dressmaker Diamante, who came to our house each season for a whole day of sewing. The day our dressmaker came was almost like a party day. Our neighbors would also come and help, and we would prepare special menus for that day. If the dressmaker was skilled enough, she would even sew more than the number of dresses she first promised. My mother would always keep extra material for a skirt at hand.  “Diamante me vas a kuzir i una fustika”[Ladino for “Diamante, you will sew me sew one more skirt, OK?”] “Si madam Fortune, si me ayudash un poko, deke no” [“Of course madam Fortune, why not if you help me a little bit”]. We would understand that the dressmaker needed little bit help from these conversations. We had neighbors who were like siblings. They would come to help. We felt more close to our neighbors than our siblings.