Simon Pilosof

This is a picture of my mother's first husband - Simon Pilosof. Many of his relatives lived in Plovdiv. He was born in Dupnitsa though. The photo was taken at the beginning of the 20th century in Dupnitsa. My mother had attended school, she knew how to read and write. When she grew up, a young guy, a sandal maker from a good family saw her and wished to marry her, and she agreed. He was a Jew from Dupnitsa, who had come to Sofia and there he noticed her and proposed marriage to her. She accepted and married him, and thus she went to live in Dupnitsa at his father’s place. Her husband was from the Pilosof kin. They lived together from 1910 to 1911 but in 1912 the war started [First Balkan War]. He went to fight in the war, and she was already pregnant. He left for the front line and never came back. Meanwhile she gave birth to a girl, my sister Oro. Unfortunately, as it often happens in such cases the boy’s parents wanted to get rid of her. She wrote a letter to her brother and he took her back to Sofia together with the baby.