Wedding photo of Yakov Sabitai

This is the wedding photo of my father's younger brother Yakov Sabitai and his wife Sterka, taken in 1933. In the first row, sitting next to her son Yakov, is my paternal grandmother, Reina, and next to Yakov's wife is her mother. The two children in the front row are from the groom's clan. Standing in the second row from left to right is Sterka's father, my father's sister Buka with her husband Buko and my parents, Sarina and Yosif Sabitai. My paternal grandparents had had twelve children, but four of them died from diseases when they were still infants. My father had a brother who was killed in the Balkan War [the First Balkan War]. One of his sisters went to the city of Plovdiv to work as a maid for a wealthy family, but the son of the landlord raped her and she, incapable of bearing the disgrace, drowned herself in the Maritsa River. Thus, four brothers and two sisters remained in Sofia, where they lived together in the same yard. Their small houses were positioned close to each other in a common yard. My father's brothers' names were Avram, Sabath and Yakov. My father's name was Yosif, although he was the firstborn son - and according to the Bible, he was supposed to be called Avram. My father was an Anglophile and I have heard that he often argued with his brother Avram, who was a Russophile. My father's sisters were called Buka, the elder one, and Esther, whom we used to call Sterina. Being the eldest of the family, my father was the most respected. Yakov was a tobacco worker. He had three children with his wife: Vizka, Reni and Tiko, who lives in Israel now. Buka had four girls and one boy. One of the girls went to Palestine illegally in 1932-33. She was followed by my aunt's son. At that time they were forced to go to Palestine illegally, using different routes. In 1939 my aunt Buka, her husband Buko and their children Reni and Mati decided to emigrate to Palestine, too. They took their chance with a small Turkish sailing vessel, which wasn't quite stable and somewhere close to the Turkish coast it sank. The whole family drowned. Only a few people survived this disaster.