Tag #125364 - Interview #77984 (Leontina Arditi)

My father had suffered a lot in his life, but he was a man of great dignity. He was half an orphan: as I mentioned before, his mother - granny Beya - had a second marriage, to the banker Aron Arav, a fabulously rich man, who couldn't stand his stepson, that is my father. Thus, being in a huge and expensive house, my father was thrown to live in the basement, and the only person who used to take pity on him was Berta the cook, around whom he grew up. Despite his merciless fate, my father managed to set off legally for France but in a goods wagon. There he started working jointly with some gypsy tinsmiths. Then he was accepted to study juridical sciences in Montpelier or in Toulouse, I don't know where exactly. As a student he found a job in a cathedral: washing the windows, cleaning, sweeping. He had worked for quite a long time there when one fine day somebody told the priest that 'he is a Jew and desecrates the church'. They fired him. After that he was a door-keeper in some French bar.

I have to tell you a funny little anecdote in regard to this: My maternal grandmother didn't like much my other grandmother because she had abandoned her child. And when she was angry, she would always feel pity for my dad: 'This golden youth, who worked in a cabaret at the door and the cloak room, where there is always such a draught! ...' And my mother when in a row with my father always used to shout: 'Of course, how can I be your favorite woman! You have seen so many naked women in this cabaret...!' My father would always set himself right with her: 'I wasn't allowed in at all.' Papa always insisted on his being a Jew. But he would say: 'I'm a Bulgarian Jew first of all.