Tag #125818 - Interview #98885 (Bitoush Behar)

My granny Rahel Behar (? – 1956) had a lot of siblings, too. I don’t know their names. And because of that she was brought up in Asenovgrad [A town in Bulgaria, situated on the northern skirts of the Rhodopi Mountains, at the exit of the Chepelare River called Chaya. The name of the town was Stanimaka until 1934. Nowadays there are about 44, 800 inhabitants. In the town there is well-developed food industry, timber processing, well-developed vine-growing and agriculture. The town is an important transport center on the road network that connects Plovdiv, Smolyan and Kurdzhali]. Her parents gave her to an aunt of hers who lived there – I don’t know her name. At that time, only the Greek language was spoken in Asenovgrad and there was a saying: ‘If you don’t like Bulgaria, go to Stanimaka.’ The Jews there were speaking Ladino but you could mainly hear Greek in the streets. My granny knew Turkish, she knew Greek, she knew Ladino and least of all she knew Bulgarian. I’ll tell you a story. I recall that she took me to the shops once in Plovdiv when I was about ten, so it must have been around 1940. We went to do the shopping. The action took place on Chetvurtuk Pazarya (Thursday Market Place). We lived just next to it. And we were looking after some hens. Granny asked the seller: ‘How much money for hens?’ He said: ‘Two napoleons.’ And one napoleon was twenty levs. And she was looking at the chickens, touching them, touching them and asking in a way typical for the Ladino language turning all the words of feminine gender to masculine. So she changed the Bulgarian word for ‘hen’, which is feminine, to masculine. [The woman was speaking Bulgarian by using endings and grammatical forms typical of Ladino.] But she was able to understand and, most importantly, she was understood.