Berta Pando, and her father Ezra Dzhaldeti

Berta Pando, and her father Ezra Dzhaldeti

I and my father in 1936. The photo was taken in the park in Yambol. There is neither a stamp of a photo studio, nor any other inscription on the back of the photo. It looks like a postcard.

My father Ezra Israel Dzhaldeti (1904 – 1968) was a very energetic, very practical and resourceful person.

He was quite wild when he was young. In 1923–24, during the September uprising, he used to be keen on anarchism. And during those riotous years he and two or three other men were sentenced to death as anarchists. But he succeeded in escaping to Turkey by using a fake passport. He lived in Turkey for a year and a half. Afterwards there was an act of grace. And later on, when things in Bulgaria settled down a little, he returned to Yambol. There, in Turkey, he worked as a shoemaker, an assistant-shoemaker, a journeyman and he managed to make a pair of tourist shoes with a hole for a gun in the sole and that was how he returned from Turkey – with a gun in the sole of his shoe. But when he returned to Yambol his brother Yeshua and his father, my grandpa Israel, were so sacred that they almost made him jump and hide into the lavatory.

After getting married he settled down and started making ‘kebapcheta’ meat fingers so he settled down because he was short of time. And that was how, in a natural way, he gave up his political activities. He didn’t use to be a member of any Jewish organizations. He became a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party only after 9th September 1944. [The day of the communist takeover in Bulgaria. In September 1944 the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria. On 9th September 1944 the Fatherland Front, a broad left-wing coalition, deposed the government.]

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