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After 9th September 1944, in my family we celebrated the high Jewish holidays, such as Pesach, Sukkot, Purim, and Chanukkah. We celebrated mainly those holidays that were somehow related to our history. Up to the time my mother was alive, we celebrated them at home, but after that we used to go to the synagogue. My father had leftist socialist views and was not religious. I asked him how he managed to match his political orientation with attending the synagogue, and he answered me very wisely that he was where the people were.
I have two daughters. The elder one’s name is Klara David Yosifov. She married a Jew in Bulgaria and went to live in Israel several years ago. She works as a [computer] programmer. The other one is called Shelly Palikarieva. She married a Bulgarian and lives in Sofia. She also studied informatics and is a [computer] programmer, too. I have also three grandsons and a great-grandson.
I wasn’t brought up to specifically marry a woman of Jewish origin. My youngest brother, for example, married a Bulgarian. My second daughter married a Bulgarian. We didn’t differentiate between Jews and Bulgarians in our family.
Although I didn’t speak Ladino when I was a child, a lot of Ladino words and sayings remained from my childhood memories. I heard my mother saying them. Two years ago, when the Ladino Club at the Jewish community center was set up, I went to listen to this speech, and I was astonished to learn that I still understood everything. Before that I had an interesting experience at an international archivists’ conference in Copenhagen. Next to me the chairman of the Spanish State Archive was speaking in Spanish with a Russian colleague, who was in the chair of the Spanish section at UNESCO, and I understood the whole conversation. Without any practice I asked if I could join their talk. The director of the Spanish State Archive was extremely amazed. He started patting me on the shoulder, congratulating me that I was allegedly speaking the language of Cervantes. [Although the Sephardim were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula hundred years earlier, Ladino probably reminded him of the Spanish Cervantes wrote in.] He was simply not able to understand how I could speak that way. He had read documents of this period, but he had never heard the sounds of this speech. This incident encouraged me and once when I was in America on a business trip I used Ladino again to help my poor English. I was in California and whenever I used Spanish, they answered me. Many Spanish people had immigrated there.
I have two daughters. The elder one’s name is Klara David Yosifov. She married a Jew in Bulgaria and went to live in Israel several years ago. She works as a [computer] programmer. The other one is called Shelly Palikarieva. She married a Bulgarian and lives in Sofia. She also studied informatics and is a [computer] programmer, too. I have also three grandsons and a great-grandson.
I wasn’t brought up to specifically marry a woman of Jewish origin. My youngest brother, for example, married a Bulgarian. My second daughter married a Bulgarian. We didn’t differentiate between Jews and Bulgarians in our family.
Although I didn’t speak Ladino when I was a child, a lot of Ladino words and sayings remained from my childhood memories. I heard my mother saying them. Two years ago, when the Ladino Club at the Jewish community center was set up, I went to listen to this speech, and I was astonished to learn that I still understood everything. Before that I had an interesting experience at an international archivists’ conference in Copenhagen. Next to me the chairman of the Spanish State Archive was speaking in Spanish with a Russian colleague, who was in the chair of the Spanish section at UNESCO, and I understood the whole conversation. Without any practice I asked if I could join their talk. The director of the Spanish State Archive was extremely amazed. He started patting me on the shoulder, congratulating me that I was allegedly speaking the language of Cervantes. [Although the Sephardim were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula hundred years earlier, Ladino probably reminded him of the Spanish Cervantes wrote in.] He was simply not able to understand how I could speak that way. He had read documents of this period, but he had never heard the sounds of this speech. This incident encouraged me and once when I was in America on a business trip I used Ladino again to help my poor English. I was in California and whenever I used Spanish, they answered me. Many Spanish people had immigrated there.
Location
Bulgaria
Interview
David Kohen