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As I said, my mother valued family relations very much and especially those with our uncles, her brothers. And this contributed to the hard financial situation of our family to a great extent. She made our father mortgage our house in Kazanlak so that he would stand surety for his nephew Iliya [son of Chelibon Bidjerano] for 4,000 levs. At that time this wasn’t a small sum of money. And Iliya, after staying for a while in Kazanlak, escaped to Plovdiv. But my father was extremely honest, and had to mortgage the house to repay the loan; we had no savings. This was a very hard period for him. When we left for Ruse later, my father asked his cousin Shabat Moskona to sell our house. He sold the house, but kept a big part of the money for himself. My father died in the year we moved to Ruse, in 1939. The worries, because of the sale of the house and the everyday problems brought my father down and he died. I cannot say anything more about that. What his cousin did also affected him badly.
Decades later I met my cousin Iliya in Tel Aviv. He seemed to have become very rich. He felt guilty, because he knew very well what my father did because of him. He even suggested writing me a check in British pounds. I rejected that straight away. What was the use of doing that now when my father was had been so crushed by it that he died?
Decades later I met my cousin Iliya in Tel Aviv. He seemed to have become very rich. He felt guilty, because he knew very well what my father did because of him. He even suggested writing me a check in British pounds. I rejected that straight away. What was the use of doing that now when my father was had been so crushed by it that he died?
Period
Year
1939
Location
Kazanlak
Bulgaria
Interview
Rafael Beraha