Tag #122879 - Interview #101186 (Leizer Finchelstein)

The fact that we were a family with 9 children, out of which 6 were boys and 3 were girls, plus father and mother, we were 11 in total. Yet one of my mother’s sisters lived with us in the house, aunt Sura. As I have previously said, she had been married to a Bulgarian Jew who left her or disappeared, and she was left to raise 2 children. So we were a team to be reckoned with. Father had to work, he was the only one who earned money in the family, mother was a housewife. I will never forget our parents’ effort to raise us. Back then, conditions were very hard, there was no hot water, no electricity. We all studied by the light of the gas lamp. Water was brought from the water pump and heated on the stove. Our only good fortune was that we lived near the Zisu Herman bathhouse, which was a public bathhouse and, as a carpenter, father sometimes worked at this bathhouse. Thus, we had free entrance to the bathhouse. Father would take the boys to the bathhouse on Friday, the schedule was for men on Friday morning, and for women towards the afternoon. Mother would take the girls then and go with them to the bathhouse as well. We washed in a wooden bathtub at home. My mother heated a large cauldron of water and we, the little ones, would enter the bathtub 2 or 3 at a time, and gambol there. There were no luxury soaps back then. You bought some sort of homemade soap which was sold by the pound, cut a slice out of it and that’s how you washed. Mother prepared changes of clothes for us at the end of the week, we didn’t change our clothes 3-4 times a week like nowadays.