
On the way here, she drove through a small village made up of pale stone houses set on a hill overlooking the valley. We stop at one overflowing with purple spring flowers and a date carved above the doorway '1889'. This is where her parents in law live. Where the family moved from the US in the 1890s. Where they jumped from new york with its Carnegie and trams, to swamps, malaria, and a bunch of goats. A bit like moving to the amazon now.
Nowadays, predictably, the village is real estate heaven, with plots snapped up after funerals, and rows of jasmine and fig trees planted by new immigrant gardeners. The cypresses still grow in the same spots though.

We walk in to the house of my father's cousin. Like my father he has bright blue eyes and the same way of asking difficult questions. He moves effortlessly from family feuds, how much people earn and what exactly your mother does during the day. (we've already covered the why aren't you married thing..)
But it's a useful trip. We talk of the clothes factory in Plovdiv my grandmother’s brothers used to run. the one that switched from making underwear (very good underwear) to uniforms for the Bulgarian army. It meant that unlike any other jew, the family was not subject to anti jewish curfew regulations.
Of there's the story where the jews of Plovdiv were taken to the Jewish school, carrying their bags and told to wait. Possibly for transportation to Auswizch. So they waited. Locked together in a big hall. At the end of the day they were just sent back home. Lives saved by the protests of parliament members, the priests, the king.
I take a few photos but no one likes to talk much about the war. Who does. On the way out we smell the apple blossom and look back as the rows of houses, looking up at the road ahead, the old bungalows superimposed on the brand new toll road above. Life, death and saving lives. Sometimes it all seems just so prosaic on the surface.
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