Tag #127607 - Interview #78077 (Adela Hinkova)

And before Pesach the whole house has to be cleaned, no crumb of bread was to be seen anywhere. The wardrobes, the rugs, the curtains were cleaned, the whole house was painted again. I learned how to paint with distemper and oil paint very early. My mother tied the brush to a long stick and I painted the outside walls. Then we would go to the town’s bathroom. I said to my mother, ‘Now, we will become Chametz, too.’ Then we boiled all the dishes in ash, salt and soap – with no running water, but only with the pump in the yard. Everything had to shine. The tinsmith came to tin the baking dishes. Pesach is the greatest holiday. We didn’t eat leavened bread, only unleavened. In Vidin we made flat cakes from it. We made the cakes without yeast; they were as hard as stone. On Pesach we gathered in the corridor. This corridor led to all the other rooms. We would gather there and listen to the Legend [Haggadah], the book being read. Then we sat at the table.

My brother would be given a towel, a napkin for the waist and they placed a loaf of bread on his back symbolizing that he was carrying the bread our ancestors ate. The bread was then used in the cooking of various things, for example dumplings immersed in eggs for the soup. Usually at least two or three families came. My father would start reading the prayer. But before that, the unmarried woman in the family would hand a jug of water to the person reading to wash his hands because it was a sin if you didn’t wash your hands. He would start reading the prayer and from time to time he would wash his hands again. He would read about what troubles God inflicted on the Egyptians: ‘Snakes, lizards and natural disasters’ and he would repeat that on and on. [The interviewee probably means locusts instead of lizards and snakes.