Suzi and Izak Sharhon in the restaurant

This photo was taken in 1955.  This is me and my husband Izak Sarhon.  This was a restaurant at the port in Karakoy. I had my hair done and we went.  There were only the two of us that night but we had a wonderful time. The photo was taken by some photographer working there.  It is a nice souvenir.  It was spring then, I remember.

I met my husband through an acquaintance.  That person told us there was somebody (my husband) so and so and when we said "OK", we met at the Hay-Layf café in Pangalti.  My uncle and my brother Vitali came, too.  We saw each other for the first time there.  We chatted a little, then we ate something and then he left.  Then, the person who introduced us went to talk to his father and they said "OK".  Then his father called my uncle and they talked about what was necessary to talk about [probably about the dowry], and then they said "OK".  Then Izak came to visit us one evening and then we got engaged in 1948.

Then, on a Sunday, on 10th July, I got married at the Zulfaris Synagogue  in Karakoy at 6:00 p.m. After the wedding ceremony, we went to my husband's parents' house.  We changed there and then went to the Belvu Hotel [the turkish version of the french expression "Belle Vue"].  We did not have a party that night.  We stayed at that hotel for 4 days.  It was raining hard all the time so we spent the whole of the 4 days inside the hotel.  We did not go out.  Then we went to Caddebostan [this district on the Asian coast of Istanbul used to be a summer resort.  It is now a residential area.].  We rented a house for the summer.  Our friends also rented a house and we spent the whole summer together having fun.

When I got married, my husband was in the import-export business. He had a place in Karakoy [a business district in the european side of Istanbul].  The business did not go well, so after a while my husband started working at the shop of my cousin Alex Samuel.  This was a cloth business and my husband was a clerk there.

We had 2 sons.  The first, Sami, was born in 1951; and the second, Yusuf, was born in 1958.  Both were born in Istanbul.

Every summer we went to Caddebostan for the summer.  There we would hire a boat and go swimming with the kids.  When we came back, we went back home in a horse carriage.  We had a lot of friends.  I can give you their names as far as I remember: Ceni Jak Rutli, Esti Mordo Peres, Zelda Yomtov Behar, ?zi Süzet Levi.  They were very intimate friends.  We were a big group and during the day we went swimming together.  Then in the evening we would meet again with the kids.  The children would play together, we would prepare food and eat all together.  Sometimes we would go out.  My husband had a car and we would go for rides.  We were together with our friends every weekend.  And when summer came, we would all rent houses near one another so we could be together all the time, both during the week and at weekends.  During the day we would go swimming and in the evening we would either go to the cinema or gather at one house.