Belina and Haim Navon

This is the engagement photo of my maternal grandparents Belina and Haim Navon, taken in Ruse around 1880. My ancestors belonged to that part of the Jewry, which came to Bulgaria from Spain - they were Sephardi Jews. The fact that my grandmothers, grandfathers and uncles spoke Ladino was proof of that. My grandparents were probably religious because there were hardly any non-religious people in their generation. I don't know about my grandfathers, but my grandmothers used to wear secular clothes. I remember my mother telling me about the Jewish community in Constanta, which differed a lot from the one in Bessarabia, where Jews used to wear caftans and payot and had a completely different way of living. My grandfathers were merchants. Both my grandparents and my parents were neither very poor nor very rich.