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My father, of course, didn’t keep the strict fast. Sometimes during the day he opened the lid of the pot with the meal for the evening. And he would take a bite. He didn’t stick to, I even remember that he liked to take us out of town and exactly on [Yom] Kippur to say, ‘Today we are going to…’. Whether it was to Knyazhevo, or somewhere else, I don’t remember, but mum was always beginning to worry, ‘I won’t be ready for the synagogue…’. Nothing to worry about, and he usually took us home when the ritual in the synagogue had already finished. But mum used to keep the fast. And this tradition – to keep [Yom] Kippur and to attend the ritual in the synagogue – continued almost to her death in spite of the severe colitis she suffered from.
I attended a Bulgarian school. Dad had never considered sending me to a Jewish school [16]. Initially I went to a nursery school and then I started school earlier than the other children – at the age of six and a half. The first grades I attended in ‘Naum Simcha’ school near ‘Simeon’ – the building still exists today. There were thirty or forty children in my class, half of them were Jewish. We used to study Christian Religion and we all attended these lessons, I even imitated my Bulgarian classmates and crossed myself. I once asked my mother whether to cross myself or not and she told me ‘You are a Jew but you can do it if you want to.’
Although my father had European education and views his dream was to make me bat mitzvah when I become twelve but, unfortunately, he died shortly before that. My mother didn’t cook kosher. We used Bulgarian at home. My father was fluent in German, but he refused to use that language with me because he didn’t like the Germans, probably because of their fascist excesses as well. On the other hand, when I was in the second grade at school, there came a teacher in Italian who offered us to enrol a course in Italian and my parents didn’t object. This is how I learned to talk and write in Italian. We were not obliged to go to church and on the Jewish high holidays we were exempt from school.
I attended a Bulgarian school. Dad had never considered sending me to a Jewish school [16]. Initially I went to a nursery school and then I started school earlier than the other children – at the age of six and a half. The first grades I attended in ‘Naum Simcha’ school near ‘Simeon’ – the building still exists today. There were thirty or forty children in my class, half of them were Jewish. We used to study Christian Religion and we all attended these lessons, I even imitated my Bulgarian classmates and crossed myself. I once asked my mother whether to cross myself or not and she told me ‘You are a Jew but you can do it if you want to.’
Although my father had European education and views his dream was to make me bat mitzvah when I become twelve but, unfortunately, he died shortly before that. My mother didn’t cook kosher. We used Bulgarian at home. My father was fluent in German, but he refused to use that language with me because he didn’t like the Germans, probably because of their fascist excesses as well. On the other hand, when I was in the second grade at school, there came a teacher in Italian who offered us to enrol a course in Italian and my parents didn’t object. This is how I learned to talk and write in Italian. We were not obliged to go to church and on the Jewish high holidays we were exempt from school.
Location
Bulgaria
Interview
Reyna Lidgi