Moshe Burla with his partner Valia in Haifa

ere you can see me with my partner Valia in Haifa. The photo was taken in 1965.

I started working in a company where Greeks used to work, in a village in Israel called Tandura, at the beach of Haifa. All the citizens there were Greeks, I mean Jewish Greeks. They had created companies of fishermen and they took me on as a mechanic on their boat. Our job was to get the nets ready and put them up in the boats, and afterwards we headed out to the sea for fishing. Usually we would go fishing in the night, we would drop anchor where we thought there’d be fish, we would turn on the lanterns, and in the morning we would pick the fish and take them to the company for sale. 

As you can imagine, you cannot always be lucky with this kind of job, so we were linked with a company that was paying us a certain percentage, and if we didn’t bring any fish, they would give us a minimum in order for us to have money to live on. And when we had fish, depending on the quantity of the fish we would get our wage. It was hard work, we would be up all night and in the morning we had to spread the nets to get them dried and mend them if they needed mending. Many times, at the moment that we had caught some great fish, a dolphin would appear and ruin everything. 

After that, when I felt that this job wasn’t good for me, I went out again as a turner. I worked in many different places there, especially in the industrial area of Haifa that is called Nifratz, which means gulf, that’s the area where most of the factories were located. There I started working as a turner, at one factory, and then at another because as a communist you didn’t last long in any position. They took me on because they had heard that I was a great turner, but as soon as the time came when you’d become irremovable, they’d kick you out and you had to find another job. From a financial point of view, we lived well, as my wife had a job as a nurse at a good hospital and she would get a wage too and so we were doing fine.