A Sephardi Life in Southeastern Europe. Aron Rodrigue

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      1/ My Parents, Childhood Memories (1863–1873)

      I was born in Samakov on 10 lyar 5623, which corresponds to 29 April 1863. At that time, Samakov was part of the Ottoman Empire. It was a small town of ten thousand, an industrial town with little trade: the iron found in great quantity in the alluvium was extracted from the ore in the primitive blast furnaces called viggnas and madens. My family on my mother’s side possessed several of these. The weaving of wool, from which fabric called chaïak was made, and the production of cheese and butter were sufficient to maintain a bit of activity and commerce in the city.

      My father, Moïse, who received the second name Nissim after a grave illness in his childhood,¹ was born in 5602 (1842) of Elia Arié, called Ham² Liatchouno, and his wife, Dona. My grandfather, who lived in almost constant poverty, died prematurely of typhoid fever at age forty-four, in 1864, leaving behind three sons, Joseph, Nissim, and Raphaël, and two daughters, Venezia and Rébecca.

      My mother, Jaël, the fifth child of Juda Arié, called Tchelebi³ Juda, was born in 1847. She had three sisters, Boulissa Arié,⁴ Reyna Tagger, and Tamar Arié, and four brothers, Moïse, David, Nahim, and Samuel.

      My mother’s family was the richest in Samakov and perhaps in Bulgaria. Their style of living and the abundance in which they lived contrasted markedly with what my mother was to find with her in-laws. But the change did not weigh heavily upon her, for the attachment she had for her husband led her to accept with joy the modesty of her new condition.

      Until the age of twenty, my father received quite an intense Hebrew education, the only kind of education available at that time, and from it his religious principles, from which he never strayed. I attribute the mediocrity of his commercial aptitudes in part to his long training in the midrasch.⁵ He was married at twenty (my mother was fifteen at the time) and found himself the head of a family, without the slightest resources and with no occupation. His father-in-law took him into his service at the office, not to handle accounts but to run errands, and my father thus found himself the servant of his brothers-in-law, who in fact treated him with indifference and often hostility.

      The family life of my parents, then, began under rather sad conditions: lacking means, they were obliged to accept the hospitality of my grandfather Juda for two years. It was in my grandfather’s home that I came into the world, and he was my godfather. They say he was very fond of me, just as he particularly loved my father and mother. But his goodness could not prevent the constant humiliations to which my parents were subjected by their brothers- and sisters-in-law.

      In 1866, my grandfather arranged a partnership between my father and Mr. Moïse Lévy, a salesman of manufactured goods, and obtained a small house for him, consisting of a single bedroom and a kitchen. My oldest childhood memories go back to that time, for I remember having seen my sister Oro at the breast. She was born in 1865. Although now settled into their own home, my parents spent almost every Saturday at my grandfather’s. Without my mother, there were no holidays or excursions to the country. It was during that time, which continued for about ten years, that my very keen taste for country life began. Even today I like to recall those delicious days spent under the trees, those evenings, each one a holiday, accompanied by the noise of the viggnas whistles and the grunts of workers as they hammered the iron, or those summer weeks spent at the farm in Bania,⁶ where we watched the lighthearted, lively fieldwork. My grandfather oversaw everything, not neglecting the pleasures, quiet pleasures that consisted in watching the men and women who harvested the land dancing in the evening around great fires, to the sound of flutes and bagpipes.

      After my grandfather’s death, these excursions, these holidays, continued until 1877, the eve of the Russo-Turkish War, but it seems to me they no longer had the mark of cordiality, of good humor, that had earlier characterized them. The quarrels that accompanied the division of my grandfather’s effects projected a shadow of mistrust, of ill-humor, on the entire family, which got worse and worse, leading to the almost total dispersal of the shared inheritance, of which there now remains only odds and ends.

      On this subject, I cannot understand why, at the death of my grandfather, my parents did not ask for part of the inheritance due my mother. At the time, it was an accepted principle that daughters had no right to the paternal inheritance, but lawyers supposedly offered to claim part of the fortune left by Tchelebi Juda. My father refused them.

      My childhood was thus spent in a mediocre financial condition close to poverty. Nevertheless, my father was still the wealthiest of his three brothers and, because of this, he had to supply a dowry and marry off his two sisters, Venezia and Rébecca. He faced up to all these burdens, even though his own family was gradually growing: Rosa was born in 1868, Elia in 1870, soon after a sister, Esmeralda, who died, and Régine in 1875. We lived in succession with Samuel Avdala (where Rosa and Elia were born), then with Mochon de Ham Aron, and finally in our own СКАЧАТЬ