Tag #138131 - Interview #96722 (Tinka Kohen)

My maternal grandfather Avramov died very young. I don’t remember him at all, I don’t even know his first name. I only remember others speaking about him as someone who had recently died. Even my elder sisters remember him only vaguely as an old man sitting quietly. My mother used to tell us that he read the Kabbala all the time; he seems to have been very religious. And from all this reading and mystery solving, he went insane and died – that’s how they explained his death. I suppose he died of some kind of mental illness or sclerosis. My grandmother, Amada Avramova, became a widow very young. She lived with her son Marko, who supported the family. Amada was a housewife and she never worked outside the home. Later I visited her more or less often. She was very friendly, she smoked cigarettes and we played cards. She wasn’t very religious: she observed the high holidays – Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, but she didn’t observe Sabbath.

Marko was the leader in the family. He was a very enterprising man and took us all to live in Sofia, including my mother. But, while he was still young he got tuberculosis and spent one year in Switzerland - at that time people with tuberculosis were sent there for treatment. Marko was well off financially and probably he himself paid for his treatment, which at that time wasn’t as expensive as it is now. When he returned, he started a textile factory. At first we all lived in the same house, later, after Marko’s death the families separated. I haven’t kept in touch with Marko’s other brothers and sisters. Gavriel left for Israel a long time ago [1935] and I seldom heard from him or from Rebecca, who left later.