Tag #125813 - Interview #98885 (Bitoush Behar)

The name of my father’s mother was Rahel Behar (nee Kovo). I don’t know when she had been born and she didn’t have any idea about that either. When I was a child, she would often say that the Russian – Turkish war [4] was in progress when she was twenty years old. She remembered those times because she got engaged then. She told me how she had seen my grandfather – her future husband Samuil Behar (? – 1936) for the first time on his way to the synagogue. He was walking past the house and she saw him, she was in the garden, and her father told her: ‘This is your future fiancé.’ My grandfather wasn’t rich, just the opposite, he was very poor but he was said to have two pairs of hands and two of feet, and his feet could work as well. That meant that he was not only extremely laborious but also very skillful. His work was connected with household utilities – locks, doors, he was the best installer of stoves on wood and coal and he was skillful in making pipes which were passing through the whole room in order to heat more. He was the only one who could make such pipe serpentines.


He didn’t have any education but spoke Ladino [5] fluently and could also write in that language. He also knew Hebrew. I don’t know how he had learned those languages, somewhere on the roads probably. My grandfather died when I was six, in 1936. I have dim memories of him. For example, I recall that he used to have a white beard and mustaches. He washed his head and beard with water and soap every Friday. My granny was pouring the water and it was falling into a basin. Afterwards, he used to go to the synagogue and he was taking me with him. He was religious although his son – Yuda Samuil Behar (1896 – 1959) - and I are absolute atheists. I remember that my father and grandfather had their own places in the synagogue. They had to pay for those places in the Jewish municipality. The places to the fore were more expensive, the ones to the rear – cheaper. The women’s places were on the balcony.