Berta Meshulam Aroyo

This is my mother Berta Meshulam Cohen, nee Aroyo. The photo was taken in 1909 in Sliven. My mother was born in Sliven in 1907. She studied in the Jewish school, which existed back then in Sliven, till the secondary school. Later she went to study in Rousse, in a Catholic college. She studied there for two years, and after that she returned to Sliven where she finished a Bulgarian school. My mother's parents Evgenia Aroyo, nee Behar, and Meshulam Aroyo were born in Sliven. I have wonderful memories of these grandparents of mine. I felt closer to my grandmother than to my mother. Unfortunately she passed away very early, in 1941. A photo album is the only thing I have from her and I still keep it, though it is already torn and the pictures have scattered, as a loving memory of her. She gave it to me as a present for my bat mitzvah. She was a very vivacious and courageous woman. Everybody loved her - my mother and me and all the other relatives. Besides she was a very intelligent woman; before her marriage she had worked as a teacher, which was a great merit in those times. Our family used to boast about this fact. You wouldn't have called her pretty, but she was a very nice and kind woman. A relative of ours, I cannot remember his name, used to come on a regular basis to ask for food. He was very poor, he wanted bread and yellow cheese and she never turned him down. Moreover she was never angry that such a small man would eat such an enormous amount of food. As a whole, my granny was more flexible than my mother and she got used to innovations more easily.