Anelia Kasabova and her mother Victoria Angelova

This is a picture of my mother Victoria Angelova, nee Elazar, and me in the city park in Sofia. The photo was taken in the late 1930s when we used to live with my grandparents in a small house on Otez Paisii Street in Kiustendil. You can see me holding a small bucket with which I used to play in the sand. My mother was the only one of the sisters in the family that got married to a Bulgarian, my father Jordan Todorov Angelov. The fact that she didn't marry a Jew wasn't a problem for the family. They separated very soon after I was born, at the beginning of the 1930s - I don't know why. I respected my father very much. I grew up on Otez Paisii Street in Sofia where my mother, my grandmother and my grandfather used to live. The house on Otez Paisii Street was very humble. There were two rooms and a dark corridor. I don't remember if we used a gas lamp or a plate at that time as there was electricity in the house. We had a wood-burning stove for heating and my mother and grandmother used to cook on it as well. My mother was very hospitable and the house always smelled of coffee. I wanted to try it very much but my mother's friends told me that my teeth would get black. I was a very naughty child and I kept on running along the tramlines on Pirotska Street. I remember that once the tram had to stop because I was standing on the lines. The tram-driver got off, pulled my ear and made me take him to the place where I lived. When I took him to my home, he scolded my mother and grandmother for not keeping an eye on me.