Tag #139670 - Interview #77961 (sophie pinkas)

My father, Leon Avram Pinkas, was born in Svishtov in 1893. As far as I know he finished his secondary trade education there. My mother, Lenka David Pinkas [nee Beraha], was born in Pirot [today Serbia], but she lived in Skopje [today Macedonia] with her family. They were Serbian Jews, but they lived later in Macedonia. My father was a military serviceman in Macedonia and met my mother there during World War I. [Bulgaria occupied Macedonia in World War I.] They married in Vienna in 1920. I know no details of their wedding, because they never talked about it. I was born in 1923 and I was the first child in the whole family. My father was a merchant in Vidin: he rented a shop and sold groceries.

My brother, Avram Leon Pinkas, is three years younger than me. We got along very well, and played together when we were little. We played 'cops and robbers' and 'chilik'. [Editor's note: 'chilik' is a stick, sharp-pointed at one of its ends, which is thrown into the air by means of another special stick called 'machka'. The one, who throws it higher, wins the game.]

I must have had dolls too, but I preferred playing with the boys outside. For example, we used to jump over a rope. We also had a horizontal bar in the yard and we tried to hang down from it for as long as we could. Our parents talked to us in Bulgarian and between them they used Bulgarian and Ladino, because my grandparents talked in Ladino. Thanks to the conversations with our grandparents we learned Ladino too.