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My father, Moshe Avram Seliktar, was a very kind, educated and intelligent man. He had a degree in finance from Vienna [today Austria]. He was very honest and that is why he didn’t become rich, although he was one of the first chartered accountants around. I remember that when he endorsed the balance sheet of a merchant and he signed it, it was considered final and wasn’t checked by finance or tax inspectors. My mother, Rahel Leon Seliktar [nee Sarfati], was a nice woman and a housewife and she looked after us. When she was young, she worked as a clerk or a secretary. Then she stayed at home. My father was born on 8th August 1888 in Sofia and my mother on 15th August 1898 in Sofia. She had secondary education and my father a university education. Their mother tongue was Bulgarian, but they also spoke French and Spaniolit [Ladino]. My father also knew German. They first met in the neighborhood. Their houses were on opposite sides of the same street. They had a religious wedding in Sofia. There were no other kinds of marriages at that time. They dressed according to the fashion of the time.
We weren’t rich, but we lived comfortably. We had two rooms, a kitchen and a small room we used for storage. My parents, brother, sister and I lived in that house. There were other rooms too, but my father’s brother and his family lived in them. That house was my grandfather’s. My grandfather had died, but my grandmother was alive. There was running water, electricity, and we used stoves to heat the rooms. My father looked after the garden. A girl came to help us in the house. She was from the village of Studena. She was a very nice Christian girl. It was a custom in Bulgaria for young girls from the villages to go work as maids in the towns. Almost all of them were Christians. She was older than us. She must have been 15 or 16 years old. She was like a sister to us.
We had a lot of books. Only one or two of them, owned by my father, were religious ones. The others were secular ones. Some of them were financial books, which my father had brought with him from Vienna. He also subscribed to economic magazines. We also had a lot of fiction literature, and the French classics: Victor Hugo, Emil Zola, Guy de Maupassant. From the Bulgarian ones: Ivan Vazov [13], Elin Pelin [14], and Dimcho Debelyanov [15]. We had the Larousse Encyclopedia in French. My parents also read the dailies. I don’t remember which ones, but we didn’t subscribe to them: my father bought them. We also rented books in Bulgarian from the Jewish community house.
We weren’t rich, but we lived comfortably. We had two rooms, a kitchen and a small room we used for storage. My parents, brother, sister and I lived in that house. There were other rooms too, but my father’s brother and his family lived in them. That house was my grandfather’s. My grandfather had died, but my grandmother was alive. There was running water, electricity, and we used stoves to heat the rooms. My father looked after the garden. A girl came to help us in the house. She was from the village of Studena. She was a very nice Christian girl. It was a custom in Bulgaria for young girls from the villages to go work as maids in the towns. Almost all of them were Christians. She was older than us. She must have been 15 or 16 years old. She was like a sister to us.
We had a lot of books. Only one or two of them, owned by my father, were religious ones. The others were secular ones. Some of them were financial books, which my father had brought with him from Vienna. He also subscribed to economic magazines. We also had a lot of fiction literature, and the French classics: Victor Hugo, Emil Zola, Guy de Maupassant. From the Bulgarian ones: Ivan Vazov [13], Elin Pelin [14], and Dimcho Debelyanov [15]. We had the Larousse Encyclopedia in French. My parents also read the dailies. I don’t remember which ones, but we didn’t subscribe to them: my father bought them. We also rented books in Bulgarian from the Jewish community house.
Location
Bulgaria
Interview
Leon Seliktar