The three Moskona sisters Yafa, Naumi and Matilda

In this photo you can see the three Moskona sisters - in the middle is my mother Yafa, on her right is Naumi and on her left Matilda. This is only a part of the photo; the other part has been torn off. On the back of the photo there is a stamp of the photo shop: a photograph by Ts. Kolarov T. Pazardzhik. The photo was most probably taken between 1905 and 1910. Then my mother hadn't been married to my father yet.

My mother was born in Pazardzhik in 1884 and died in 1961 in Sofia. She had two brothers and two sisters: Bohor, Roben, Matilda and Naumi. She was the only one from all the children to finish a French school: Alliance Francaise. Apart from Ladino and Bulgarian, she also spoke French fluently. She married at the age of 38 in Yambol. My mother told me that she was from a poor family and didn't even have dowry or wedding chemise. That was the reason why she hadn't married the boy who she had loved before my father. His parents simply didn't agree to give their blessings under these conditions. This is why she got married so late, to my father.

My mother was of medium height and, no matter that she had lived with my father for only fourteen years, she was very devoted to him. When my father died she had the chance to marry, for the second time, a man with a good financial situation. I remember that my aunts, Matilda and Naumi, for a long time tried to talk her into it because the suitor, whose name I can't remember, had two houses and a shop. Nonetheless he was much older than her. And so, she didn't agree. The reasons for that were on the one hand, she couldn't forget my father, and, on the other, the suitor was much older than her. And the third reason, may be the most important one, was that I, after hearing this conversation between my aunts and her, started crying and said that I would never live in that man's house. It seems to me that she refused because of me as well. She didn't want to hurt me. At that time, after my father's death, I was eleven. My mother, like my father, was always very considerate of me.