I remember celebration of Victory Day on 9 May 1945. All farmers got together in the center of the settlement in front of the village council building. There were tables installed there and all people brought what they could. Chairman of the collective farm said a speech remembering the deceased including my father. On this day laughter was mixed with tears: it was a happy and a sad day.
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Displaying 41191 - 41220 of 50826 results
Hava Goldshtein
We needed to begin life anew. Our house was in place, but it was occupied by the family of Abraham Modergeim. They returned from evacuation before we did and since their house was destroyed they moved in ours. Abraham didn’t want to move out of our house and we had to sue him. We temporarily stayed with Bershak family. Only at the beginning of 1946 the court took a positive decision for us and we had our house back, but those people took with them all our furniture and kitchen utensils. We moved in an empty house, but we were too exhausted to sue Abraham for theft.
I finished a short-term course of vine-growers and began to work at the vineyard. Was a dexterous worker and earned good money.
Finally I agreed to marry Boris giving up to my mother and Shmul Bershak. We had a civil ceremony and a small wedding party for close relatives and friends at our home. I had an ankle long wedding gown made at the tailor shop in our collective farm. There was no synagogue or a rabbi in the collective farm. My husband’s parents insisted that we had a chuppah installed where I was lead by Shmul Bershak. One of older religious Jews conducted the wedding ceremony. This was the first Jewish wedding after the war and the whole collective farm celebrated it.
We didn’t have our son circumcised since there was no rabbi in the village or anyone else, who could do it. Besides, I didn’t feel any need to have him circumcised.
My life wasn’t easy. I went on my first vacation when my son turned 18. I never had any recreation before: I received my ‘vacation pay’ (I always needed money) and stayed at work. I got along well with my colleagues. I had Jewish, Russian and Ukrainian friends. We celebrated birthdays and Soviet holidays together. We didn’t observe any traditions or celebrate Jewish holidays. I didn’t remarry. After Boris betrayed me I didn’t trust men and never let any of them to come near me. We stayed at home in the evenings having discussions and drinking tea. Sometimes our friends and acquaintances visited us. I spent time with my son and was busy doing housework: cleaning, cooking and washing.
Director of the factory at the shop of which I worked was Semyon Averbukh. He was kind with me. He understood how hard it was for me to raise a son. Semyon trained me and I was soon promoted to supervisor. We made rubber boots and went to sell them in other towns. We had a multinational collective at work.
In early 1950 state anti-Semitism was at its height. Radio and newspapers broadcast news about Jewish cosmopolites and doctor poisoners. One could hear abusive ‘zhydovka’ everywhere in the streets [10], but we had good relationships in our collective.
We went on parades on 1 May and 7 November [11] and celebrated all Soviet holidays in our club, had parties drinking and singing Soviet songs. Semyon was a deputy of the district council and helped many of my colleagues to have their issues associated with housing problems, installation of telephone, giving higher education to their children and arrangements for recreation resolved.
I took absolutely no interest in any politics. I was too busy with my personal issues. I had Russian and Ukrainian friends and never cared about nationality. When my son grew old I began to spend more time with friends gong to theaters and cinema and reading Soviet magazines. In late 1970s my sister and I bought a TV and spent evenings watching it. I went on vacation to the Crimea several times.
My son Victor had Jewish, Ukrainian and Russian friends at school. He wasn’t great success with his studies, but he was a cheerful and sociable boy. He didn’t face any anti-Semitism. After finishing school he finished a barber school and became a skilled barber. He was promoted to director of a barbershop.
My son always identified himself as a Jew, but he came to the Jewish way of life after he got Jewish friends at 16 that observed Jewish traditions and were religious. He could not celebrate holidays at home since Valia teased him about it and happened to not turned out to be - no be anti-Semitic. The majority of his colleagues were Jews and they didn’t have any objections when Victor became director; they liked and respected him.
In 1992 Victor divorced Valia and married Alla, a Jewish woman. Victor and Alla decided to move to Israel. Victor was always interested in this country and listened to foreign radio stations that were jammed during the Soviet power to conceal the true situation in Israel and the rest of free world from people in the Soviet Union. Victor and Alla submitted their documents for obtaining permission to move to Israel. I was planning to go with them when Victor fell severely ill. He got arthritis and he was confined to bed. In 1999 my son died.
Semyon Goldwar
My grandfather on my mother’s side Isay Rabinovich was born in Odessa in the 1860s. I don’t know what kind of education he got, but I am sure that he finished a grammar school. Before the revolution of 1917 my grandfather supplied leather to Odessa leather factory. He purchased leather in Nizhniy Novgorod, Leipzig and Dresden. My grandfather could speak foreign languages. He wore business suits and was very elegant. He had a beard and moustache.
My grandmother Bertha Rabinovich, nee Bronshtein, was born in Odessa in the late 1860s. She was a housewife. My mother told me that they had a cook, but my grandmother made delicious Jewish food by herself. My grandmother was an intelligent and educated woman. She finished grammar school and had fluent French. She held herself straight and always looked very elegant. She didn’t wear a wig or a shawl. My mother never told me whether they observed Jewish traditions in her family. They spoke Russian at home.
During the Great Patriotic War my grandmother stayed in Odessa. She perished in the ghetto in 1942 along with her daughter Clara and her three grandchildren.
In 1937 [2] uncle Grigoriy was arrested. He was accused of an attempted encroachment on Stalin. He went on hunger strike in jail of which he died. We found out the details of Grigoriy’s death only after Stalin died.
When the war began in 1941 Clara’s husband went to the front. Clara, her three children and her mother, my grandmother Bertha refused to evacuate. Clara believed that the Germans were harmless and were not to last over two or three months. She didn’t want to move with the children to strange places, so she stayed. She was last seen with her mother and children in the march of Jews along Koblevskaya Street to the ghetto in Slobodka in January 1942. We don’t know how they perished, but we know that it must have been an excruciatingly tormenting death.
My grandfather on my father’s side Avrum-Leizer Goldwarg was born in Berezovka town, Kherson province [90 km from Odessa] in 1845. At that time Berezovka had Jewish and German population. The Germans were called ‘dachi’ – probably a derivative of ‘deutsch‘. People communicated in German and Yiddish. At home my grandmother and grandfather spoke Yiddish, but they also knew Russian that they used with my mother and me.
My grandfather was a religious man and attended the synagogue – he was a gabbai, a warden in the synagogue. [The interviewee means a shammash and not a community representative, what gabbai really means.] This was an elective position and the Jews usually elected the most decent and honest man. My grandfather was a horse dealer. He went to Odessa and other towns to buy the weakest and most miserable horses that he cured in his own stables and sold at a higher price. This was how he made a living. His family was wealthy for its time. They had a 3-hectare plot of land and two houses. They leased the smaller house and lived in the bigger two-storied house: my grandfather, grandmother and their younger son Isaac and his family. We also stayed there when we visited Berezovka They had a big orchard and a big barn with grain.
He died from pneumonia in 1931 at the age of 87. He was buried according to the Jewish tradition. He was put on a white sheet on the floor and there were candles burning. Then he was taken to the main synagogue in Rishelievskaya street on the corner of the Jewish Street. This was my first time in synagogue. It was a beautiful building with columns of the Corinthian Order, benches for men in the lower tier and women’s area in the upper tier. My grandfather was covered with a black cloth with a hexahedral star on it. My grandfather was a very respectable man and he was carried by people in their hands from the synagogue to Jewish cemetery– the distance of about 3 km. Many people came to his funeral. I remember the ride in a horse-driven cart where elderly Jews were sitting, since they couldn’t walk such a long distance. The community installed a gravestone on my grandfather’s grave.
My grandmother was a housewife: she did everything about the house and kept livestock; chickens, ducks and a cow that she milked twice a day. She made traditional Jewish food: Gefilte fish, stew, sweet and sour meat, meat with prunes and stuffed chicken neck with chicken liver or semolina. She baked delicious pastries and made jam. There was a Russian stove in the kitchen and my grandmother baked bread once a week. She took some grain from the barn to the German baker to grind it to flour and made rich and big bread. This was the most delicious bread I ever had in my life. We lived in Berezovka when I was 4 and my mother watched my grandmother cooking to learn things from her. My grandmother wore dark skirts and a kerchief on her head. She was religious and went to synagogue on Saturday and on holidays. A Ukrainian woman came to do the housework on Saturday.
My father Miron Goldwar was born in Berezovka, Kherson province, in 1897. He was not called Goldwarg because he asked the last letter to be deleted in his last name when he received his passport. He might have studied in cheder in Berezovka. He came to Odessa when he was a young boy. His older brother Matvey lived in Odessa. Matvey helped him to get an employment in the Yung’s pharmacy. My father was a courier – he delivered medications that he stored in a basket. He entered a Realschule. He studied well and was ambitious. He gained much from meeting the Rabinovich family – not just because he met my mother. My father was struck by their way of life. He came from a small and poor family in a village. And all of a sudden he joined the society of educated and wealthy people. He was planning to work hard to gain such way of life, but the total confusion in the country connected with the revolution of 1917 and Civil War broke his plans.
My mother finished a grammar school. She enjoyed studying at school. She knew French and played the piano. She had many friends and admirers. After finishing grammar school in the age of 17 my mother lived with her parents and didn’t work.
My parents got married in the early 1920s. My father courted my mother for a long time before marrying her. I didn’t ask my parents about their wedding, I didn’t even know anything about a traditional Jewish wedding.
In 1931 or 1932 we moved from Kherson to Odessa. In 1932 my father quit his job and entered Odessa Construction Institute. We rented the 2nd floor of a small two-storied house near the market across the street from the church in Slobodka. We lived in one room. I cannot remember how it was furnished. My mother’s sister Clara, her family and grandmother Bertha occupied two other rooms. We had a common kitchen and a toilet. There was running water and electricity in the house, but the stove was wood stake. I was allowed to play with the other children in the yard and to this day I do not know of what nationality they were; it was not important.
1932–1933 were years of famine [5]. My father worked at a construction site in the daytime and studied at the Institute in the evening. My father took empty containers to the Institute where he received a free meal that he took home. There was some mixture for the first course called ‘green borsch’. My mother added some water and carrots to it to make it eatable. And there was some cereal for the second course. My mother worked at the Torgsin [6] at the New Market. My mother received her salary in rubles and a portion of it was calculated in hard currency, only they couldn’t have it, but could receive butter or sugar for it. My parents also received tram tickets at work – 30-60 tickets that I used to sell 15 kopecks each at a tram stop to make some money. My parents walked to work. Tram 15 that commuted from Slobodka to the center of the town stopped near the Duke’s Garden where all passengers got off the tram to walk uphill and the tram climbed the hill empty. The tram was not powerful enough to go up the hill with the passengers on. On top of the hill all passengers got in to continue on their way. I also remember when my father bought a box of cigarette paper he and my mother stuffed them with tobacco and I went to sell them at the market. I was selling them humming the tune: ‘Kupite, koyft di papirosn’. [This is the first line of a well-known Yiddish song.] My mother and I were trying to do our best to help my father provide for the family.
. In 1937 my father and a group of engineers from the construction department received a little plot of land near the sea. Six of them built three houses and each family received half a house into their disposal: two rooms, a small kitchen and a big verandah. There was a cellar under the kitchen. and a shower, electricity and running water in the house. We planted an orchard. Since 1937 we moved there in May after the school ended and staid till the fall when it got cold in this summerhouse. The father went to work from there. I used to walk barefoot there. I spent all my time on the beach. I swam and dived well.
I went to the first class of the Ukrainian higher secondary school near our house in 1932. Our first teacher was a fat rough woman. She slapped us on our cheeks. I was a naughty and lively boy and suffered the most. Once I gathered together a group of my classmates and led them to director’s office to complain. The situation was scandalous and the teacher was hfired. We liked a lot our next teacher Vera Ivanovna. I don’t know what nationalities were in my class. We didn’t focus on the issue of any national origin. I got along well with all children. At Christmas our teacher staged an anti-religious play The Pope and the Barometer. It was about a draught when farmers asked a priest to pray for rain. The priest said that they were sinners and didn’t deserve to be prayed for. But then one day he said to the farmers: ‘All right, I don’t want your children to be hungry – let’s go to the field and I shall pray.’ They went into the field and the moment the priest began to say his prayer it began to rain. However, the reason was that the priest had a barometer at home and knew when it would rain. I read the author’s lines – and our performance deserved a storm of applause. But when I came out of the school some boys in the street called me ‘zhyd’ [Jew]. I heard the word zhyd for the first time. When I came home I began to ask my parents what the word zhyd meant and they had to calm me down.
At 15 I joined the Komsomol [8] league. I looked forward to this day. I believed in all the communist ideas. The first step was the School Komsomol Committee. The final decision was taken by the District Committee. There you solemnly received your Komsomol card. I took an active part in public life: I was the editor of our wall newspaper. I liked all Soviet holidays: the October Revolution Day [9] and the 1st of May. On these days we went in a march with red flags and communist slogans on banners. I had many friends and never thought about their nationality.