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My mother always had a housemaid at home. I remember that when I got the scarlet fever, my mother made all my brothers stay with relatives and at home we were only three of us – my mother, the housemaid and I. Once I had a terrible nightmare – in my dream somebody wanted to cover me up with a big glass – there was a hand stretching through the window above my bed. I startled and began crying ‘Mum, I have a pee.’ She was sleeping then but she woke up and sent the housemaid to see what was wrong with me. She woke up on her turn, came to me and started shouting – ‘Misses, fire in the house!’ The chimney was burning – so we got up and began screaming: ‘Help!’ The fire brigade was just round the corner, they came quickly and put out the fire. After 1941 Jewish families were no longer allowed to have Bulgarians for servants. So my mother started hiring Gypsy women instead. On St. Dimitar’s day five to six girls would come with a negotiator to discuss their accommodation and wage. My grandfathers and grandmothers may have had servants, too, but I can’t say it for sure. In the Jewish neighborhood where we lived, there were predominantly Jews, but some Bulgarians and Turks lived there, too. We never had quarrels with them. Next to us lived a military doctor’s assistant – a Bulgarian, we used to call him uncle Ivan. It was he who would take care of us when some of us was ill – he carried out blood-letting or cupped us when some of us had got the flu. I don’t know if any of my grandfathers had served in the army. Next to us, there was a Turkish family living also, who sent me a huge pumpkin and baklava [Turkish sweet] as a gift for my bar mitzvah.
I was born on 24th March in Ruse in 1927. My father’s first wife got ill and died in hospital in Bucharest. Her sons, Yakov and Mayer, were five and six years old when dad married my mother. I am my mother’s eldest son; a year and a half after me my brother Marko was born and much later, in 1934, - my sister Suzana, as we used to call her, but her birth name was Sultana. When she married in Israel her mother-in-law and father-in-law changed her name to Elana – so that she would have a Jewish name.
I attended a kindergarten a year before I became a schoolboy – the kindergarten was at the Jewish school. I started studying Ivrit there. We had a teacher who couldn’t speak Bulgarian, because she had come from abroad. At home, my mother and the maidservant looked after us. We had a big yard where we used to play. The ‘Maccabi’ organization [7] also had a big yard and we used to play football there. On Sundays, we used to go the gym hall. We had a sports community and we had plans for building a gym hall. It was almost constructed, but never finished, so it had neither baths nor changing rooms. However, the gym hall had all the required equipment – parallel bars, horizontal bars, wall bars and we used to go there to play from an early age.
I was born on 24th March in Ruse in 1927. My father’s first wife got ill and died in hospital in Bucharest. Her sons, Yakov and Mayer, were five and six years old when dad married my mother. I am my mother’s eldest son; a year and a half after me my brother Marko was born and much later, in 1934, - my sister Suzana, as we used to call her, but her birth name was Sultana. When she married in Israel her mother-in-law and father-in-law changed her name to Elana – so that she would have a Jewish name.
I attended a kindergarten a year before I became a schoolboy – the kindergarten was at the Jewish school. I started studying Ivrit there. We had a teacher who couldn’t speak Bulgarian, because she had come from abroad. At home, my mother and the maidservant looked after us. We had a big yard where we used to play. The ‘Maccabi’ organization [7] also had a big yard and we used to play football there. On Sundays, we used to go the gym hall. We had a sports community and we had plans for building a gym hall. It was almost constructed, but never finished, so it had neither baths nor changing rooms. However, the gym hall had all the required equipment – parallel bars, horizontal bars, wall bars and we used to go there to play from an early age.
Location
Bulgaria
Interview
Avram Pinkas