I was a pioneer [13] and Komsomol member.
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Displaying 38521 - 38550 of 50826 results
Alexander Tsvey
My mother and I were very poor at that time. When I was in the 7th grade there was a party at school and I did not have anything dressy. All my pants were patched and short. I wore them everyday, but I wanted to dress up on the holiday.
I did not feel Anti-Semitism at school. Both teachers and my peer treated me very well. At that time nationality was of no importance. I even did not know whether there any other Jews in my class. I did not feel any inferiority complexes because of my nationality. I did not feel myself harmed of lower-class. I was confident. I was a pioneer [13] and Komsomol member.
I was a good student. Mother kept on telling me if I wanted to achieve anything in my life I should study well. I preferred sciences at school and mathematics was my favorite subject. When I was in the 7th grade I was the only student from school who was sent to the town Olympiad in mathematics and I took a prize.
Then the house, where we lived, was demolished and we were given a room in a communal apartment [12] in a different district of Moscow.
I went to school, when I turned 8. I had studied in Russian school, not far from our house for the first 3 years.
I was raised Russian and did not think of religion at all.
Mother knew some words in Yiddish. When I was little she sang me some Yiddish songs. I also remember Jewish aphorisms. Mother spoke Russian with her brothers. They considered Russian to be the language of all peoples in USSR.
Mother and her brothers were totally unreligious. They were bereft of parents rather early and there was nobody to teach them traditions and religion.
I was afflicted with lung disease because of constant malnutrition.
Those were the times of hunger. There was a dreadful starvation in Ukraine [Famine in Ukraine] [10], there was hunger in Moscow as well. We were famished. A lump of sugar was a rare dainty for me. Couple of times mother got the cards [Card system] [11] for the canteen for the privileged workers. We had a lavish meal there. I remember when I was in the metro in 1935, I saw a man eating a candy. My eyes looked so hungry and wretched that mother promised to buy me a candy.
,
1935
See text in interview
Mother did not work in the children’s board for a long time. She had been on the trips all over the country, supervising orphanages and organizing work.
Mother coped with her work and took an active part in social life. She was noticed and then promoted to the post of deputy the regional council [regional administration], though she was not the member of the party. Then mother was hired by the plant as a time-keeper. Again her skills did not remain unnoticed. She was assigned as an instructor to the children’s board by BTsIK [Bsesoyuzny Tsentralny Ispolitelny Komitet, All-Union Central Executive Committee].
Grandfather remained religious till death. It is difficult for me to judge his religiousness, but I know that he strictly observed Jewish traditions, observed kashrut.
Grandfather got married for the second time. She was also a Jew.
Grandmother died in 1940. She was buried in Leningrad Jewish cemetery in accordance with the Jewish rite.
Grandfather commemorated the day of father’s death till the end of his days. He always went to the synagogue on that day and read kaddish for his son, who died earlier than he. Candles were lit at home on that day.
My father died from lung tuberculosis in 1927.
Uncle Fyodor was a frontier man by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was promoted to the rank of a major no matter that his brother was repressed. It was Stalin’s politics- imprison one and persecute – another.
Vladimir now lives in Israel.
,
After WW2
See text in interview
Brother welcomed soviet regime and became its active sticklers. Joseph was an active Komsomol [4] member. He married a Jewish girl Sara, also Komsomol member. Joseph was a passionate orator, devoted to the ideas of the party and revolution. He was a political go-getter. In 1934 he became the secretary of the party committee of one of the largest plants in Moscow (I do not remember which one). Then he was assigned the secretary of the regional party committee and then later on the secretary of Kursk [about 450 km to the south from Moscow] municipal party committee. Joseph did very well before the outbreak of repressions [Great Terror] [5]. Then in 1938 there was a brief article in the paper «The Secretary of Kursk municipal party committee is mistaken», wherein Joseph was unfairly castigated. He went to Moscow to seek truth and did not come back. He was arrested and in 1938 shot without trial. We found about it only in the 1960s when we got his rehabilitation certificate [Rehabilitation in the Soviet Union] [6], but back in 1937 mother had been staying by walls of NKVD [7] days and nights and still did not manage to find anything about the brother. They even did not let her give him a parcel with the rusks and tobacco.
When Uncle Efim became a dignitary, he was literally made to join the party.
Efim was involved in commerce in Moscow and was promoted rather swiftly. He was assigned deputy chairman of the all-union procurement organization Tsentrosoyuz, which bought out and sold production manufactured by different small-scale companies. Efim had a personal car, which was rare back in that time. He was assigned to the same post after World War II as well.
did not have a baby-sitter, so I went to work with mother. I was in the workshop observing the assembly line with sugar bales. In spite of the fact that mother was lonely and worked hard, she remained brisk and cheerful.
He must have insisted that mother also moved with him to Moscow. Efim did not have his place at that time, so he rented a room in house where common people lived. They were really indigent. We had a passage room. An artist named Zhukovskaya lived in the next room. Every morning she passed through our room and walked to the toilet to pour out her night pot. There was hardly any furniture in our room- 2 chairs, a table, mother’s bed and my cot.
Mother’s elder brother Efim finished vocational school and acquired a profession of an accountant in his native town.
, Russia
I do not know what was the reason of the tiff between my parents. All I know is that they separated in 1927.
,
1927
See text in interview
Besides, nobody told my mother about father’s disease- open form of tuberculosis.
I do not know how my parents met. It was a love wedlock. They had a traditional Jewish wedding.
She did not even manage to finish secondary school.