Margarita and her husband Shemuel Kohen

I and my husband Sharlo [Shemuel Kohen] – an engagement photo from 1939 taken in Plovdiv. The picture was taken in a studio: Photo Stamenov, 5 Ivan Vazov. There is no other inscription on the back of the photo. We got engaged on New Year’s Eve while meeting the new 1939.

We first got engaged. So many guests came! The grandmothers, my brother-in-law, all of them came to visit us in ‘St. Kliment’ Street. After that the wedding took place in their house, not in the synagogue because my mother-in-law had apoplexy and couldn’t move. So the wedding was in the presence of a rabbi here on the third floor in 1939.

My husband Shemuel Samuel Kohen was born in 1906 in the town of Samokov. He was a Sephardi Jew. He had three brothers – Leon, Mois and Zhak. My husband was the youngest – the fourth child. Sharlo had finished the Jewish junior high school. After that he had enrolled in the high school and had started studying there but his parents couldn’t afford it and he couldn’t finish it, he dropped out. He started work first as a carpenter, then he became a clerk and in the end, just before getting engaged, he started helping his parents. Afterwards, when the shop needed an accountant, instead of hiring somebody else, he quit the accountancy and started helping his father and brother. After 1944 he finished planner courses and worked as a planner at machine tools enterprises like ‘Balkan’ and ‘Madara’. It was very nice to be with him, he was good company. He wasn’t picking on people, he was very tolerant and later, in marriage, he remained the same – very open-minded, easy-going and with great sense of humor – man with spirit. In fact, the choice was mutual but it seems to me his father liked me very much too.