Tag #124125 - Interview #95940 (Victoria Almalekh)

My father finished the Jewish school in Sofia as well as the junior high school there. He was a goldsmith by profession, this was his main occupation. He used to work in Sofia but when he was still quite young he got the well-known vibration disease. This is a disease of the peripheral nervous system. It is typical for people making the same moves all the time in their job, like goldsmiths. It causes hand-tingling which makes working impossible. Of course in those days there were no professional disease clinics so the vibration disease was practically incurable. The easiest thing my father could do was to change his occupation. So he became a medical goods dealer. He started providing pharmacies with finished and semi-finished medicines such as drugs, different kinds of syrups, pills and powders. For instance some pharmacy would need a bottle of davilla tincture whereas another one would buy only 25 grams of it, because this is the quantity needed for a certain kind of syrup. They would also order some ethyl alcohol, cotton, bandages etc. So he was supposed to have certain knowledge which he had gathered during the Second Balkan War [5] when he was a health-officer. He served under the leadership of professor Racho Angelov – the first Bulgarian Minister of Health after 9th September 1944 [6]. What he had learned there was of great help in his job.