Tag #141292 - Interview #98619 (Margarita Kohen )

We were raising our kids in a Jewish spirit although my husband was a communist and atheist. They are both circumcised. Sami was an excellent student at school. He had received excellent marks and certificates. Whenever I was at a parents’meeting the teacher didn’t miss the opportunity to compliment me that I shouldn’t go there at all. Outside school he was playing the piano and had a tutor in French. He even enrolled in the Musical School but he gave up and dropped out. He enrolled in an ordinary school. My husband, who was a very clever and practical man, used the holidays to teach him how to tune pianos so that he would have a vocation. My biggest desire was for him to study medicine because that was my unfulfilled dream. But he chose his own path – he graduated from the Law Department in Sofia. As an award for his graduation I decided to sponsor his move to Israel. So in 1965 he went to his aunt in Israel and lived there for thirty years. In 1968 he got married there – to a sabra. His wife’s name is Lea. I couldn’t attend the wedding because at the time the relations between Bulgaria and Israel weren’t good and the authorities wouldn’t even let us travel to there [Severing the diplomatic ties between the Eastern Bloc and Israel] [24]. In Israel he had worked as a piano tuner. He has two twin sisters – Margarit and Tamar and a son – Eran – who committed suicide. He returned to Bulgaria in 1993 and now he is unemployed here.

My younger son Ouri has only primary education. He got meningitis, which the doctors discovered at a late stage, and it transformed into schizophrenia. We did everything possible to deal with the disease. We even sold part of the house – we were all the time spending money on doctors but it was irreversible. Now he is in the mental institution in the village of Petkovo.