Buka Yuda Madzhar, Sara Yuda Komforti and Klara Madzhar

The photo was taken in Dupnitsa after 1935. My mother Buka Yuda Madzhar is third from right to left, standing. My two grandmothers are also in the photo. My maternal grandmother, Sara Yuda Komforti (nee Aron Bardevid), is the first from right to left in the lower row, and my paternal grandmother, Klara Madzhar (nee Pilosof), is second from right to left. My mother 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. She was a very good cook. My father would often bring some edible offal home from work and my mother made various meals with it. My grandmother Sara was a housewife and looked after the children; there were eight of them, after all! My grandfather had elementary education from the Jewish school. He was a very polite man. I can?t say that he was religious, my grandmother wasn?t either. Only Ladino was spoken at home. They also knew Bulgarian, although my grandmother didn't know it very well. I don?t know whether they knew any other languages. My grandfather Sabitay married Klara Pilosof in Dupnitsa. This was his second marriage. He was first married to another woman, from whom he had two sons and a daughter ? Rahamin, Aron and Miriam. I never knew my paternal grandfather, because he died in 1925, one year before I was born, but I remember Grandmother Klara very well. She was born in 1850 in Dupnitsa and died in 1954 at the age of 104. She grew up in Dupnitsa. She and my grandfather had three daughters and one son ? Buka, Vida, Rashel and my father Sabitay. My grandfather processed guts used to wrap sausages, a job my father inherited from him. They didn't make the sausages themselves, they only processed the guts and sold them.