Tag #125849 - Interview #98885 (Bitoush Behar)

Our house was furnished poorly. We used to have two iron beds where my parents were sleeping. My sister was sleeping together with me. There was a wooden bed for granny. My brother and I were sleeping on a hard sofa in the kitchen. We had one single wardrobe. Well, after all, we weren’t so needy because we used to have decent furniture although sometimes food turned out to be difficult to obtain. We always had something to eat but we couldn’t afford to do whatever we wanted to do. A certain dish was cooked in the morning and we would eat from it at lunch and would have the same for dinner. One day I wanted to peep into the pot to see what we were going to have for lunch, and to steal a bite if possible. Dad saw me and ‘slap’ – a smack across the face. ‘You are going to eat what you find served in front of you!’ The whole family usually gathered for lunch and dinner. We waited for dad to sit at the table and then we would sit at the table, too. Mum would always put the first plate in front of him and after that she served us. We didn’t have servants. While my granny was alive the meal for Saturday was always prepared on Friday. We were not allowed to cook on Saturday. But the table was laid in a rather formal manner with a white tablecloth. Before that, on Thursday or Friday, a chicken, a hen or a duck had been slaughtered. In the yard of the synagogue, behind a fence there was a slaughterhouse for hens and lambs. We used to buy the hens alive from Chetvurtuk Pazarya [Thursday market] and we transported them in baskets. The price of the slaughtering varied according to the type of the animal. Some of our dishes were kosher. Never has pork been cooked. All the cutlery and crockery was being cleaned with boiling water for Pesach. Milk and meat were never mixed but we didn’t have separate plates for the different types of food. My parents haven’t done bar mitzvah for me, I don’t know if my brother had had it done. The women had a bath on Friday but we, the men, only washed. I recall that dad had a bath every fifteen days or once a month and there were Jews who took a bath rarely still – twice a year, for Pesach and Rosh Hashanah.