The children's home, where Vitya stayed, was very anti-Semitic. Teachers humiliated Jewish children in every possible way, and also his play-mates aimed at offending or even beating Jewish children. That's why he concealed his Jewishness as much as he could and was ashamed of his mother's Jewish stepmother, who was his only relative alive. Vitya was ashamed of her; he rudely cut short any assistance and care from her side when he was 14-16 years old and grew up a real anti-Semite.
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Displaying 9421 - 9450 of 50826 results
Galina Shkolnikova
The family spoke Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian, but the common language at home was Yiddish, my grandparents' mother tongue. Grandmother Riva didn't speak Russian well. When children quoted her in letters, they wrote her words in Yiddish using the Russian alphabet. Her older daughter, Feiga, also spoke Russian poorly.
My mother's parents were religious people. They observed all Jewish traditions: They had a kosher household, observed Sabbath, attended the synagogue and celebrated all Jewish holidays. Grandfather Yankel was an active member of the community and a synagogue warden; he donated a lot to it. He died in 1914 in Yekaterinoslav and was buried in the Jewish cemetery according to the Jewish tradition.
My father finished the commercial school in Nikopol. It was the year 1915, and he was drafted to the army.
I don't know if he managed to participate in World War I military operations. He was a soldier at the beginning of the Civil War [1918-1921], but soon returned home and later served in the Red Army as a corps man for four months.
In 1920 he entered the Kharkov Technological Institute and graduated in 1924 as a chemical engineer. After graduation he was assigned to Donbass, the Donetsk coal fields in the south-east of Ukraine, where he worked at JSC Koksobenzol in the town of Artyom.
My mother Sofia Yankel-Movshevna Yezerskaya was born in 1899 in the town of Yekaterinoslav. She finished the private Jewish secular gymnasium in that town and chose the medical walk of life. She entered the Medical Faculty of the Yekaterinoslav University in 1916. The Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War prevented her from graduating. She graduated from the Medical Institute in Kharkov in 1924 and left for Donbass to work as a 'traveling' doctor. She visited various villages on a cart; the hospital coachman led the horse.
When my parents met in 1925, my mother worked in a hospital at Pereyezdnaya station. They got married in 1927. They didn't have a religious wedding: my parents' friends, young Komsomol members [8] and some other people were present.
My father worked at the Institute of Applied Chemistry (GIPH) in Leningrad, and my mother worked as a district doctor in the Gavan Polyclinic. She wanted to work in a hospital though and as a result found herself in the Children's Hospital, located near the Volkov cemetery.
When Leningrad was besieged and the Germans began to bomb it, people had to go to the bomb- shelters during the bombings. I lived with my grandmother and, as my mother told me later, I liked the bomb-shelter very much because a lot of children gathered there. So when I heard the air-raid warning signal, I began to jump and run cheerfully around the table. By the time my 80-year-old grandmother managed to catch and dress me, the bombings were over. As a result we stopped going to the bomb-shelter.
My father was a very straightforward person and supported the ideas of the Communist Party. At the beginning of the Civil War he served in the army and became a non-party Bolshevik. My mother was indignant with him because, in her opinion, he couldn't 'read between the lines' and 'lived according to the Pravda editorial', that is, in compliance with the ideology of the Communist Party of the USSR. He didn't doubt its correctness. He was always distinguished by honesty, adherence to principles, and an acute feeling for justice. In addition to his main job he was occupied with trade-union activities. He was responsible for the distribution of tickets at the Mestkom [10] of his Institute, and didn't take summer-camp tickets for me, when I was a child, because he considered it a demonstration of nepotism.
During the first days of the war my father went to sign up for the People's Volunteer Corps, as he was not subject to the draft, but mother, being a doctor, was already transferred to the state of barracks. She insisted that he stay with my grandmother and me. He continued to work in GIPH, but was soon also enlisted to the state of barracks.
In August 1941 my mother made an effort to send us into evacuation, but the Germans had bombed a train with evacuated people near Mga, Leningrad region, so she decided against the idea. Thus we all found ourselves in the siege.
The three of us were evacuated in July 1942 across Ladoga Lake [The so- called Road of Life] [11] and found ourselves in Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan [2,200 km south-east of Moscow], where my mother worked as a doctor at the children's hospital. My father worked as an engineer at the Chemical and Metallurgical Institute.
He was preparing for the defense of his doctor's thesis, but in January 1944 he was drafted to the army. Father was at the Leningrad frontline. He was an artillery-man, an ammunition carrier. In one of the battles a shell hit the ground and everybody, except for my father, perished.
I went to a kindergarten in Alma-Ata and learnt a song there. It went: 'A Jew slowly crossed the road' and so on. I was 5 years old and it was the time when mother commenced my Jewish upbringing. At that time and during my school years she kept telling me, 'Don't forget that you are a Jew and won't get away with something your Russian friends will be able to get away with'. My husband-to-be and many other Jews, with whom I spoke about it later, heard almost the same thing from their relatives. I was convinced that if I wanted to achieve something I had to work more and harder. It became my belief. I also said this to my children when the time came.
The most striking thing in Alma-Ata was Victory Day [then end of WWII]. I heard about it when I was in the hotel entrance hall and on my way to the kindergarten. The kindergarten wasn't far away and I walked there on my own. I ran the whole way in order to tell the children about it, because almost no one had a radio at home. And still, when I recall that moment, I hear the happy screaming and see the cloud of dust, which was the result of our happy tramping and jumping around.
My father worked as a senior research assistant at his Institute, although he didn't defend a doctor's thesis. In later years he worked at the Informational Department, was the academic secretary of GIPH and dealt with the distribution of precious metals for experiments.
In order to take me to the country- side, my mother worked in Komarovo, a resort village near Leningrad, in a district children's hospital. It only operated in the summer when a lot of children left Leningrad to spend summer holidays in kindergartens and pioneer camps, located along the Finnish Gulf. She worked there on assignment from her hospital.
Influenced by her friend, my mother didn't quite believe in the 'correct party policy' but, just like father, had a good attitude towards Stalin. They were both very proud of him after the war. However, after the fake Doctors' Plot [15] of 1952-1953 they regarded the death of the leader rather calmly.
My father wasn't concerned about the case, but my mother was very upset. On the one hand, she was afraid to be fired, on the other hand, she suffered from undisguised suspicions, which the sick children's parents expressed towards a Jewish doctor. When usually very uncared-for children recovered, some parents apologized for their suspicions. Mother was mostly irritated by a phrase like, 'There might as well be good people among the Jews'. She often replied to it, 'They are in the majority'.
My mother was proud of her Jewish identity, telling us about the Great Jews and their contribution to the treasury of mankind, though Jewish traditions were never observed in our family. For instance, she told me about the great writer Sholem Aleichem [16] and about the scientist [Albert] Einstein. However, two customs were sacred to her and she observed them, as well as I observe them now - a separate pan for milk and the inadmissibility of food in the cemetery.
Our family was not used to blame all losses on anti-Semitism. We treated the occurrence like bad weather. In such situations mother usually repeated her older brother's wife's saying, 'No need of fear for the Jews'. Mother very often used well-known folk idioms and Russian-Yiddish-Ukrainian proverbs in her speech. For example, 'Agitsyn parovoz' [heat in the steam- engine], which means 'nothing special'.
We also lived in relatively decent conditions, as we had two rooms with a total area of 32 square meters in a communal apartment in the city center.
I finished school in 1956. Unfortunately, I didn't enter an institute [university] right after school because the competition was high, so I had to go work as a copyist at a Repair-Assembly Combine. My mother asked my father to arrange a job for me at GIPH, but my father, a man of principle, flatly refused to do so. In 1958 I entered the Leningrad Technological Institute of Cellulose-Paper Industry. I graduated as an engineer- technologist in 1963.
I started to work at the Technological Department of the Giprobum Design Institute [State Design Institute for Paper Industry] and worked there as a technologist until I retired in 1996. We had a very nice and friendly team, most of the people were born between 1930 and 1939. We still keep in touch, call each other and meet from time to time. I liked the job and the business-trips, and even periodical emergencies, when we had to work till late at night and on weekends. However, there was something I really hated. Those were trips to sovkhoz fields and vegetable storages, which occurred regularly.
I got married rather late, in 1970, when I was already 31. We had a secular wedding at home, with our friends and some relatives present. My husband, Alexander Moiseyevich Shkolnikov, was born in 1933 in Leningrad. He graduated from the Leningrad Ship-Building Institute as an electrical engineer in 1957 and started to work at Gidropribor CIHD [Central Institute of Hydraulic-Engineering Devices]. He worked there all his life.
Our son, Mikhail, was born there in 1971, and our daughter, Lyuba, followed in 1976. In the same year we moved in with my parents. We exchanged our one- bedroom apartment and two rooms of my parents in a communal apartment for a separate three-bedroom apartment.
Our children didn't get traditional Jewish upbringing, though they identify themselves as Jews. Their mother and father are Jews, and they consider themselves Jews too, not from a religious but from a nationality point of view. Traditional Jewish customs were never observed at home and we only celebrated Soviet holidays: 7th November - the Day of the October Revolution, 1st May - the Day of the Workers' Solidarity, 8th March -Women's Day, and so on.
Mikhail graduated from the Leningrad Electro-Technical Institute named after Ulyanov-Lenin [LETI] in 1994 and works as a programmer. His wife Tamara is a Jew; they studied together. When they got married she quit, and now she looks after their daughter Asia, who was born in 1997.
My daughter, Lyubov Bugayeva [nee Shkolnikova], graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics [LITMO] in 2000.
My daughter, Lyubov Bugayeva [nee Shkolnikova], graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics [LITMO] in 2000.