Tag #141224 - Interview #98619 (Margarita Kohen )

Grandpa Bokhor was an intelligent man, he was thinking about the future and was quite practical, he was in pace with the times. He realized that every man and every woman should have a vocation. He sent my mother to Dupnitsa [in southwest Bulgaria, 49 km from Sofia], beyond the border. The border was in Kocherinovo village and Boboshevo village. Dupnitsa was in Bulgaria whereas Blagoevgrad or Gorna Dzhumaya was still within the Ottoman Empire [Status of Macedonia] [7] and grandpa sent her to Dupnitsa to learn sewing. The second and the third daughters were sent to learn knitting, the fourth one became an embroider and he bought her an embroidery machine; the fifth one became a seamstress too; the sixth one – she even had a secondary education – learned to make fillet-works… the fashionable networks which were becoming popular everywhere. I mean that all the daughters had learned a craft. And not all of them, as he used to say, to stay only with a bracelet in hand. But he gave his children not only these crafts, but education as well. My mother was the oldest and she remained illiterate but with time each one of the children was getting a higher and higher degree of education. Ester and Victoria had primary education, Roza and Eshua – junior high school education, that means a finished third grade and the youngest even received high school education. In that way, depending on the times and their age, the education was better and better.