My grandfather left us on March 20th 2020. His name was Beniamin Israel Varon. He lived to become 95 years, surviving the Second World War and the Sowjet Regime as a Jew in Bulgaria. He passed away without many of his family or friends being able to say goodbye to him due to the Corona lockdown. Many in his home country will remember him for his deeds, his thinking and his writing but few know about him outside of Bulgaria.
Angel Wagenstein, an author and screenwriter and a childhood friend of my grandfather, wrote these wonderful words a few days after his passing. They were published in a Bulgarian newspaper called Duma. Moved by these lines I translated them to English and publish them now for others to read.
We were barefoot kids in the poor Turkish-Jewish neighbourhood of Horta Mesar in Plovdiv, whom our parents still called Filibe. One of us was Benjo, who deliberately passed the soft warm dust through his toes, which after the autumn warm rains became impassable mud. I was telling fantasies to my gaping comrades of how we came back from France to Plovdiv with a balloon, how we descended the rope ladder and other fabrications, probably inspired by the writings of Jules Verne or watched at the movies — then still silent, but still intoxicating with their fantasies.
Benjo. We did not yet know that his full name was Benjamin and the family name was — Israel Varon. And we did not know that after years of separation our diversified paths of life would merge into a steep but distant and bright path that would pass through police jails, prison cells, guerrilla dugouts and illegal newspapers with the invariable “Read and pass on to others.” And we didn’t know how you could be betrayed not by strangers but by your own …
… After many, many years, already white and tired, in our “silent autumn”, we sat in the attic on Elin Pelin Street — with Valery Petrov — Benjamin Varon, Hristo Ganev and I, all four at different times and at various occasions excluded from the Party and again accepted, and again excluded for “otherness”, for expressed concerns and doubts, and again accepted. Maybe not always them, but sometimes we were the sinners, but we always remained to the death true to the ideal to which we had devoted both life and hope. But the truest and hardest hit was Benjo — that boy who passed the warm dust of Plovdiv through his toes, and later the worries about the right direction of the Path through his heart.
And when I, with deep sadness, learned that he had left us faraway from Filibe, and read the obituary from his relatives, I felt a warm breath of the lasting heritage he left to his relatives: “an honestly lived life, given to the family and for the realisation of the greatest ideal of humanity.”
Goodbye, Benjo, my dear friend from Horta Mesar!
Written by Angel Wagenstein and published in Duma