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My parents didn’t know Hebrew and they weren’t religious. We celebrated Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, but we didn’t observe Sabbath. My sisters joined the socialist movement from an early age and we were atheists. The holidays bored us. Our father took the book [the Haggadah on seder]; it was written in Bulgarian, or maybe in Ladino, I don’t remember. He read out of it for a while, as my mother prepared the dinner. Since I was the youngest child, they gave me a bag with small loaves of bread to carry, like those made during the escape from Egypt, but different from the matzah. They were very hard and we could hardly eat them. During the evening my sisters read books and nobody paid attention to what our father was reading. My sisters and I didn’t go to the synagogue, later I started going there, but only to meet with boys in the courtyard. We didn’t eat kosher food. My mother didn’t go the synagogue either, probably because she was deaf.
Location
Bulgaria
Interview
Tinka Kohen