Avram Moisey Pinkas and his wife Lilyana Kirilova Pinkas, and their sister-in-law Lily, wife of Avram's brother Marko Moisey Pinkas

I, my wife Lilyana Kirilova Pinkas (her maiden name is Mandicheva) on the left and our sister-in-law Lily (in the middle). She is wife of my brother Marko Moisey Pinkas. This is the entrance of the villa in the village of  Staro Selo, near Sofia. The picture was taken on 19th July 1996.

I was born on 24th March in Ruse in 1927. My father's first wife got ill and died in hospital in Bucharest. Her sons, Yakov and Mayer, were five and six years old when dad married my mother. I am my mother's eldest son; a year and a half after me my brother Marko was born and much later, in 1934, - my sister Suzana, as we used to call her, but her birth name was Sultana. When she married in Israel her mother-in-law and father-in-law changed her name to Elana - so that she would have a Jewish name. 

I have always wondered how my mother decided to marry a widower with two kids and my aunt told me: 'She was in love with him.' My mother was staying at the door when once my father came to negotiate something with her brother, and then he kissed her. My mother's knees gave way beneath her. They had already known each other because they were some kind of distant relatives. My mother fell in love - Dad was a handsome man. However he was by 15 years older than her. And my mother married him in spite of the protests of her relatives. When my father died in 1945 he was 56, while Mum was 41, alone and with three children. They didn't make difference between the children from his first marriage and us - we were equal and we felt each other as real brothers. The younger son [Mayer Moisey Pinkas] from his first wife died of cancer - he was a very good technician, he had golden hands as we say. For a long period of time he was denied his request to start working for the military complex in Israel, because he had been a member of the Union of Young Workers in Bulgaria. Finally they accepted him. After that, I remember him showing me some magazines where they praised him for something. The elder brother [Yakov Moisey Pinkas] did not have any profession. In 1948 he started working something in the accountancy department of ZHITI factory (for iron and wire). His wife was economist and in 1949 they decided to move to Israel.