Tag #138046 - Interview #78770 (Yako Yakov)

I was only eight to nine years old, but I clearly remember that 1929-30 was a bad period [17]. There was a strong economic stagnation. My father was left without a job, because the company where he worked as a traveling salesman went bankrupt. My mother had never worked. He was also suffering from a stomach ulcer and had to be one of the first people to be operated on for an ulcer in Bulgaria. The operation was performed in Pavlikeni [a town in Northern Bulgaria] by the young Dr. Varkoni. At that time he lived and worked in the town of Pavlikeni. Later he moved to live and work in Sofia. Today there is a medical clinic in the center of Sofia named after him. My father had to pay for the operation and put aside some money for medications. We had to sell some of our furniture to be able to make ends meet.

Our situation started improving only in 1933-34 when my father resumed work as a traveling salesman, and he established his own company. He often went with two briefcases from Ruse to Sofia, where he bought ironware, screws, bolts, latches and hinges. Then he came back to the small towns on the Danube coast to bring them the advances of civilization. At that time households in Europe were already using latches and hinges. There was no electricity and running water in Ruse then. I remember that for most of my childhood my mother cleaned the bottles of the gas lamps regularly. Electricity came to the Jewish neighborhood at the end of the 1930s.