Zhana Santo Solomonova

This is my mother Zhana Santo Solomonova, nee Almalech, in a Bulgarian national folk costume in front of our house in Stara Zagora. The photo was taken around 1940, perhaps at a Purim masquerade. My mother was a housewife and took care of me. I didn't have a nanny. At home I communicated mainly with my mother - she introduced me to literature and music. We had a lot of books: the ones by the Russians I mentioned earlier and by classical Western European writers such as Ibsen and Zola. The books were in Bulgarian. My mother bought them, but she also read books from the library - there was a city library in Stara Zagora. There was a dentist, a Jew, from whom she also used to borrow novels. She used to send me to collect them and later I returned them. My mother also bought children's books. We didn't have religious books. My parents regularly read newspapers: 'Utro' [Morning], 'Zora' [Dawn], 'Zarya' [Sunrise], which were the most popular newspapers at the time. My mother used to tell us how she read between the lines and realized what had happened. We had a radio set but it was confiscated after the legislation of the anti-Jewish laws.