Tag #127578 - Interview #97523 (Suzi Sarhon)

My father had a hardware shop.  He was the only one then; there were no other hardware shops around.  He used to do a lot of business with Anatolia and his business was very good.  We were very well-off.  I grew up with a nanny and we had a maid, too.  Unfortunately my dad died in January 1936.  I was 9 at the time.  He had a heart disease.  In fact, when he and my mother got married, he already had heart problems.  He was not very young when he got married.  I used to see him feel uncomfortable and open the window to get some fresh air.  He would breathe deeply to relieve his distress.  “What’s the matter, Jozef?”, my mother would ask him at those times and he would reply, “Oh, nothing, it’s nothing”.  He wouldn’t tell her anything.  He just exhausted himself running around for other people.  One day he had a heart attack.  The doctor warned him: “Mr. Danon, you will not bend down to even tie your shoes, let your children tie your shoes.  Don’t tire yourself and don’t go out”.  But in the meantime my father’s business was not going well because he used to gamble with his friends and neighbors every night till morning.  He ruined his business in that way.  He and my mother would have fights about this gambling of his.  He would even go to neighbors in our apartment and not come back for hours on end.  In that way, the shop and the business was ruined.  When he died, he had a lot of money owed to him because he had sold a lot of goods to a lot of people but we did not know anything about the business and how were we to find those people?  So we couldn’t collect any of those debts.  No one came forward and said anything.  He had a lot of clients in Anatolia and they all disappeared.  If we, the children, had been older, then we could have followed and dealt with these problems but we were all so very young and we did not have anything.