Tag #127071 - Interview #78448 (Eli (Eliyau) Perahya)

My father was the only subscriber [probably not literally the only subscriber, but there must have been very few of them] in Turkey of Forverts [5], a periodical printed in Yiddish in the U.S.; the periodical came rolled up in a tube. He of course knew Yiddish very well because he had studied at the Hilfsverein Jewish school even though he himself was Sephardic. He liked to read it aloud while simultaneously translating it into French. He kept all the issues. At one time there were so many periodicals piled up at home that I remember quite clearly, my mother telling him, ‘Ya basta, los echaremos’ [Ladino: ‘enough, let’s throw them away’]. Since he was neither very talented in trading nor really interested in it, he wouldn’t go to the shop very often; mostly it was his brother and father who ran the business. Instead he preferred to go to the synagogue and the yeshiva [yeshivah] and have religious discussions with the rabbis and his friends. I probably got my habit of reading and discussing from him and later developed it further with personal effort.