Tag #141788 - Interview #78803 (Leon Mordohay Madzhar)

My mother, Buka Yuda Madzhar [nee Komforti], was born in 1894 in Dupnitsa. She didn’t work; she took care of me, my sister and the house. She was the one who cooked. My grandmother also cooked sometimes, but since she helped my father with his work, my mother was in charge of the household chores. When she was young, she worked in the tobacco warehouses; she came from a very poor family and didn’t go to school. Although our family was poor, my father earned enough money so that we would not be among the poorest ones. Most of the people in Dupnitsa lived in misery. Only my mother looked after us, and we never had a maid.

My mother was a very good cook. My father would often bring some edible offal home from work and my mother made various meals with it. Take, for example, the lower part of the pork legs, where there is no meat, only bones and tendons. My mother cleaned them up and made various tidbits. She also made a dish out of brawn and eggs. It was delicious. All this was not kosher, of course, but we didn’t keep kosher. When my father brought pork home, we hid it from my grandmother, who kept kosher until she died and couldn’t get used to us eating pork. If my grandson were to see one of the meals we ate back then, I’m sure he would be sick, but they were very tasty. My grandson never kept kosher, but in principle these foods don’t look very enticing. Nowadays the young don’t like them and it’s difficult for them to get used to the taste.

My mother was very strict. I remember many times when she beat me. When I was a child, I fell in the river [Struma] once and the people got scared that I had drowned. When they called my mother, instead of being happy that I was alive, she gave me a hard beating for going to the river without asking for permission.