Victoria Angelova, Zelma Avramova and friends

This is a picture of my mother Victoria Angelova, nee Elazar (sitting in the centre), her sister Zelma Avramova, nee Elazar (sitting in front and wearing a white blouse) and my mother's friends Olga (standing on the far right), Rashel (sitting in front next to my aunt Zelma) and some other friends of theirs whom I don't know. The photo was taken in the 1910s in Kyustendil where my mother was born.

In my mother's baptismal certificate it is written that she was born on 654, Gradetz Street in March 1906. My mother's parents rented a house there. Not many people had their own houses at that time. The house where my mother was born was somewhere near Hisarlaka [a hill in the central part of the town]. I don't know exactly where the house was situated because my mother's whole family moved to Sofia at the beginning of the 1920s. All her sisters and her brother were very young and most of them started working as shop assistants. They lived on Pirotska Street when they came to Sofia and afterwards they moved into a house on Otetz Paisii Street in the Jewish neighborhood of Iuchbunar. There were many textile merchants and my mother and her sisters managed to start working in their shops.

Aunt Zelma married a textile merchant and went back to live in Kyustendil - their house was in the center of town. I remember that when I was a little child my mother used to take me to Kiustendil every summer to visit my aunt.