Ester Baruh with her pupils

Ester Baruh with her pupils

This photograph was taken on 12th December 1949 in the village of Nedelino. My wife Ester Baruh, nee Asher, is in the center wearing a green jacket given to her by the Joint [American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee]. I met my future wife in Pazardjik, where she had also been interned. She was very young, 16, a high-school student. Her maiden name was Ester Leon Asher. Her father, Leon Moshe Asher, was born in the town of Samokov. He was a leatherworker. Her mother Berta Asher was from the town of Vidin. They married in 1918 and came to live in Sofia. My wife has one brother, Mois Asher, who was a construction engineer and married a Bulgarian, Elena. They had one son. Mois died in 1995. Immediately after the wedding in 1948 my wife went to the village of Nedelino [a village in the Rhodope Mountains in the Zlatograd district, close to the Greek border] as a temporary freelance teacher at an elementary school. I visited her there and I remember how we were riding horses along the borderline with a frontier officer and looking at the Aegean Sea. I wrote a story of a woman-teacher at the border, 'At the Front Post' that was published as a serial in the newspaper Narodna Mladezh [People's Youth] in 1949 but now I see it as a bit of a conjuncture. In fact, we celebrated our wedding when she came back for the Easter vacation in the spring of 1949 in the house of my brother Armand who had already married Mati Pinkas - a lot of people gathered; it was a great fun.
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