Berta Pando and her father Ezra Dzhaldeti

Berta Pando and her father Ezra Dzhaldeti

In the park in Yambol I am with papa Ezra Dzhaldeti. I was daddy’s boy. It was the way he was bringing me up – as a boy. In this photo I’m 4 years old. May be that was why I was so crazy and liked to play with the boys. There is no inscription on the back of the photo. There is only a stamp of ‘Photo Yambol’ photo studio.

At first my father started selling milk and after that put some tables in the shop itself. Later on he put some tables on the sidewalk and it turned out to be something between an inn and a shop. There were seven or eight tables inside the shop and four or five outside. Every evening a lot of people gathered here, mostly Jews but not only. It was so noisy! My dad was known as uncle Ezrata. He was very sociable and used to attract a lot of customers. He used to have heaps of friends – Jews and Bulgarians. In front of his shop there was an enormous sign that read: ‘Dairy and Kebapcheta Shop Ezra Dzhaldeti Kosher’. Kosher was written both in Hebrew and in Bulgarian. And as a matter of fact he obeyed all the rules of kosher. The ‘kebapcheta’ were made from lamb and veal or from mutton and veal. He used to sell milk only in the morning and ‘kebapcheta’ – only in the evening.

Not only did my father sell the milk, he also processed it. People from the nearby villages would bring the milk to him in the morning. He put it on the hob to boil, then poured it into some basins, leavened it and at dusk he would start making ‘kebapcheta’. Such were those basins – for four or five litres of milk...

And it was yogurt difficult to describe – it was as thick as cheese, as butter… And when dad started to cut it, he used to have that spoon made from tin that was almost flat, and he dipped it into the yogurt and take some out of the basin – and the yogurt stayed like that, like a slice made of milk and when a person wanted to buy yogurt that was what he would do – dip the spoon into the basin and put two or three such slices into a bowl – as much as the customer wanted. After finishing work with the milk, dad started work on the meat. He was preparing it into a wooden trough in order to make the minced meat for the ‘kebapcheta’.

Open this page