Ester Bohoracheva

This is my mother Ester Bohoracheva, nee Komforti, as a young lady, photographed in Dupnitsa in the 1920s.

My mother was born in Dupnitsa, a small town in Western Bulgaria between Sofia and Kiustendil, in 1905. When she married my father in 1927 she came to live in Sofia. She graduated from a junior high school, but she didn't work so that she could look after my sisters and me. We lived in the Jewish quarter near Bet Am and the Great Synagogue, but then there were smaller synagogues too. WWe had a house with a yard in which there were only flowers, and my friends and I played mostly there. Our house had three rooms. We had running water and heated the house with coal and wood. My mother did all the housework by herself. My parents kept in touch mainly with their relatives, as our kin was quite big, and most of their friends were Jews.