Shortly afterward my father got a transfer to a tinned food factory in Bazorkino village in 20 km from Ordzhonikidze where he became chief engineer. There was a sovkhoz growing vegetables for this factory and there was a steppe around. We also had a vegetable garden and I took to liking gardening then. к My mother worked at the tinned food factory. She checked the quality and identified the cost of vegetable shipments. I didn’t go to school. My mother was afraid of letting me out of the house. There were rumors that Chechens kidnapped Russian children.
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Displaying 35731 - 35760 of 50826 results
Gherda Kagan
In Andizhan [3 500 from Odessa in Uzbekistan] I finally went to school. My classmates were mainly children of evacuated families. One of them was Glukhov, an overgrown boy four years older than me, a very annoying albino boy with white hair and red eyes. He beat me so hard for my being a Jew that I decided for myself, being only 11 years old: I should marry a Russian man so that my children didn’t suffer as much as I did. Schoolchildren went perform concerts in hospitals and also gathered clothes for them.
In 1944 my parents decided to return to Odessa. This wasn’t an easy thing to do: they needed a pass, permit and documents. My father went to Moscow to obtain permission and we lived with uncle David’s family at Kinel station near Kuibyshev through that winter. There was no job in Odessa and my father was appointed to restore a tinned food factory in Tiraspol. We lived there for a year. Victory Day in Tiraspol is one of the strongest impressions in my life. When at half past five in the morning we woke up from crazy knocking on the door, my father decided that the factory exploded. It turned out they woke him up on the occasion of the victory. There was a small square in front of a garden in the central square. Everybody came there including schoolchildren and we, pioneers, were there wearing our red neckties. It was warm and sunny and there were lilac trees and tulips in blossom. It was so beautiful. Everybody smiled, but when they said ‘Glory to deceased heroes’, every single person burst into tears!
In 1946 we returned to Odessa. I heard that my teacher of music and her mother were buried alive. She was so beautiful and so kind and I’ve never got over this. There were other tenants in our apartment. When we were still in Tiraspol, my father applied to court to have our apartment back, the court refused him. My mother and father made the rounds of their acquaintances looking for our belongings. Romanians took away all better things. We found a mirror, grandmother’s box, carved walnut wood sticks with bronze incrustation, damaged by shipworms. Our neighbors told us that the janitor had our wardrobe. When my mother went to see the janitor’s daughter, her friends, they grew up together, she showed her an ax from behind the closed door and said: ‘If you make a step, this ax will damage the wardrobe first and then you will know it as well’.
We lived in the territory of the plant for a year and a half and I went to school #103 in Moldavanka. We studied French. My grandmother helped me to improve my French and I finished the 7th grade with an award for my accomplishments. In 1947, at the age of 14, I joined Komsomol.
Fortunately, Kibertseva and I managed to enter colleges without medals, though this was the first year when Jews began to face obstacles entering higher educational institutions. There was struggle against cosmopolitans 23 in process. Many of my Jewish friends failed to enter colleges, though they studied as well as I did. I entered the technological department of tinned food of the Food Industry College. When I became a student this dressmaker that my mother knew made me a suit from inexpensive half-woolen fabric of bottle green color.
The period of ‘doctors’ plot’ 24 went past me somehow. I was in love and was engaged with my private life.
However, I remember very well the Stalin died. We heard the news at home and I went to college by tram #23. Usually old Belgian trams, jogging and rattling were never quiet or boring. There was always a wit with his jokes or some wicked woman starting a wrangle in a streetcar. On that day it seemed there was nobody in the tram. It took me a while to get to Grecheskaya Square from Bolshaya Arnautskaya Street and there was deathly silence all this trip. In college a young teacher came into the classroom. She had tearful eyes. She sat down and looked at us. Somebody sniffed and then everybody had tears poring down: we cried after Stalin for an hour and a half. I went to study English at school at that time and I was walking home late at night. There wee deserted streets and mourning music sounded from windows.
In 1954, when I was a 4-year student I married Yevgeniy Grinblat, a 5-year student of Flour grinding College.
After finishing his college my husband received a job assignment to work on a new elevator in Novosibirsk, but he fell ill and recovered three months later when there was no more vacancy there. He went to Moscow to obtain another assignment. They offered him work in Uryupinsk town in Volgograd region. My husband was chief mechanic at a plant. I defended my diploma and went to work at this same plant as a forewoman. There was something wrong with our life there right at the beginning. Director invited us to his office and said that a shop superintendent who had a small child had a very small room and asked whether we could let him move into the apartment that was supposed to be given to chief mechanic of the plant. How could we say ‘no’? We found ourselves living in a very small room with little windows and my husband could touch the ceiling with his palm, though he is not a giant. There was no running water, thought there was a factory boiler right against our windows. Nobody cared about installing 20 meters of piping to supply water to three plant houses. We had to go up the hill three blocks away to the to a town pump: an example of Soviet attitude to people.
My husband’s friend Anatoliy Timokhov who was at the front during the war and now worked at the district Party committee as an instructor showed us a report of Khrushchev 25 on the 20th Party Congress 26 in 1956. My mother, my husband and I read it commenting and remembering different events. I always knew that my father, a decent honorable man and excellent specialist, was innocent, but sent to prison, but we couldn’t know the whole truth. Stalin was commonly believed to be a nice person and many people wrote him letters seeking for help. After this report, we thought, everything was going to well. We had a new country and new government.
In 1956 we returned to Odessa and settled down in my husband mother’s apartment. My husband went to work at the design office of machine building plant. I found a vacancy of rate setter technician at the rate setting research laboratory at the food industry headquarters. I worked there three years, but I didn’t like this job. Nobody needed it. My father was working at the scientific research institute of food industry. He was a scientific deputy director. I went to work in the laboratory there.
In 1962 I joined the party, but not for the sake of ideas. I had my personal reasons. Firstly, all of my former co-students were members of the party already and I was used to belong to the advanced circles of masses. Secondly, I was concerned that if my father quit his job at the institute I might lose my position of scientific employee and interesting work. My father never joined the Party, although they were trying to convince him. He teased me about it. My mother took my side. She believed joining the Party was a formal procedure necessary for a career.
My daughter Natalia went to school in 1963. She had expressed Jewish looks and she suffered a lot from anti-Semitic demonstrations of her classmates at school. As a result, she developed a strongly negative attitude toward her Jewish identity.
Natalia reluctantly entered the school of Soviet trade. After finishing it she worked in ‘the house of toys’. Her management valued her high, but Natalia was attracted to the theater. She went to work as an usher at the Ukrainian Theater and then became an electrician to have an opportunity to travel with the theater.
We had a good life in the 1960s - 1970s. My husband was chief engineer of a plant and earned well. I also had a high salary. I often went on business trips all over the country. I met people in planes, at railway stations and in hotels. I was sociable and liked talking with people. I was a devoted Soviet person for a long time. Although I saw mismanagement and bureaucracy in our tinned food industry, I thought they were our local drawbacks related to Odessa area. I read Soviet newspapers and believed that everything was well in the soviet country. My daughter always laughed at me calling me an idealist. My husband was critical about the soviet reality. He went crazy seeing Brezhnev on TV. I asked my husband to not criticize the soviet regime in a loud voice for the fear that our neighbors could hear him.
When new director with anti-Semitic convictions came to the plant, my husband began to have problems. I’ve never been ashamed of my nationality, but sometimes I had to keep silent about it. Since I have Slavic appearance, they often told me anti-Semitic stories in lines or elsewhere. I listened quietly and then mentioned that I was also a Jew and watched their reaction. I’ve always identified myself as a Jew, but we never thought about any Jewish traditions in our house, particularly religious, and never celebrated Jewish holidays. My mother or father never showed any interest in them until the end of her life.
I was an active member of the party and was fond of public life. I was responsible for the wall newspaper and I also participated in a team of agitators during elections. Of course, I knew how useless and insignificant my efforts were. When voters didn’t appear at elections my senior comrades pushed their bulletins into boxes before my eyes. When I was a member of district commissions, they sent me home before the day was over. I had no objections and one could only guess how they wrote those minutes or signed them. No decent person likes to take part in forgery, but I understood that if I wanted to leave the Party, it was like the end of one’s life: everything would be threatened – one’s work and attitudes of surrounding people. So I kept quiet.
Perestroika started for me with a feeling of more freedom. In 1987 I traveled abroad for the first time in my life. I went to Czechoslovakia and Germany with a tourist group. I couldn’t travel abroad before. In Czechoslovakia young people expressed their obstruction to our group of Soviet tourists. It was more than unpleasant. Gorbachev 28 was nice compared to Brezhnev. He seemed like a sun to us at the beginning. We were happy that he was accessible. It was my understanding that the meaning of perestroika was to make things good and right. It was nicely said, but it was done as before, that’s it. People are the same and same are their attitudes, particularly in Ukraine.
In 1991 the break up of the USSR 29 was a terrible shock for me. We lost our motherland. Then I understood a phrase from ‘Hamlet’: ‘the link of times has broken’. Until today the former Soviet Union is nothing but my country for me. When my TV doesn’t function properly and I cannot watch Moscow programs, I miss them. What’ happening in Ukraine seems to me a miserable parody on what is going on in Moscow. Let them make mistakes or do things wrong, but if you have brains and if they’ve already stepped on rakes in Moscow, learn your lessons in Ukraine and do something different. Cannot Ukraine with its 50 million population find decent and reasonable people? I live here as if it were a strange country.
In 1991 my husband and I and my daughter with her sons submitted our documents to the OVIR office for departure to Israel since all of our friends had already left. We obtained departure permits when a war in the Persian Gulf began and we stayed. I feel for Israel with all my heart. I would love to live there, but I am afraid of the war.
I am very happy about the rebirth of Jewish life in Odessa. I enjoy going to a wonderful Jewish library in Pionerskaya Street. I receive free Jewish newspapers ‘Or Sameyach’ and ‘Shomrei Shabos’ and I collect interesting articles from there. Few years ago I established contacts with Gemilut Hesed. An acquaintance of mine mentioned to me about this organization. I registered there and then for another year I tried to convince my husband to register there as well so that we could receive two packages instead of one. Of course, Gemilut Hesed social assistance helps me a lot. They do my laundry for me. Once my shoes needed to be fixed and Gemilut Hesed paid for shoemaker’s services. Following my husband I got fond of the history of Odessa. We have a good collection of books on this subject. Few years ago they invited me to work in the town archives. In parallel I started looking for the documents related to the history of my family. I’ve found some and now I write memoirs hoping that my grandchildren would find it interesting.
One of Mordko Voolih’s sons, my great grandfather Meir Voolih, inherited his alabaster plant. Like all Voolih men he was a fair-haired giant with an open cheerful character. Sitting at the table he liked joking that he was eating alabaster kugel [pudding from matzah or vegetables]. Meir was happily married and had four sons. His wife Yenta was very religious and the family followed kashrut and observed all Jewish traditions for the love and respect of her. Yenta wore a wig and wore her kerchief above her ears. At Yom Kippur, before going to the synagogue, my great grandmother cleaned the house, locked the food and gave her husband a bunch of keys.
Esphir, the younger daughter, became my grandmother. She was born in Odessa in 1877. She finished private grammar school. My grandmother was shortsighted and said that she ruined her eyesight reading at night with a candle under a blanket. My grandmother was a pretty blond when she studied in grammar school. She said that when she was a senior student her teacher of drawing was not indifferent to her. Grandmother Esphir wore elegant clothes when she was young. My mother told me that she had beautiful outfits decorated with bugles. She kept her fancy gowns in a bog box and during a general clean up before Pesach she took them out to air them. There was a housemaid and a cook in the house. Esphir was so scared after a pogrom in Odessa in 1905 1 that my grandfather sent her and their three small children – Yulia, David and 6-month-old Raisa (my mother) to Vevey town in Switzerland for a year. They stayed in a boarding house. My grandmother Esphir wasn’t religious and didn’t observe any Jewish traditions.
After October revolution 2 my grandmother was very unhappy about having to cook her first soup at the age of 45 after they lost a cook and wash the staircase in the corridor like all other tenants. Of course, she didn’t approve of these ‘’niceties’ of Soviet life and having to stand in line to buy food products. During horrible famine in 1921 3 grandmother Esphir took her family to Druzhelubovka Voznesensk district of Nikolaev region, to a former estate of Odessa artist Nikolay Kuznetsov where she visited when she was young. In 1920 a sovkhoz was organized in this estate. They stayed there with their relatives’ families for a year, working in the garden, keeping livestock, making brynza and mamaliga and managed to survive.
My maternal great grandfather Abram Zivik owned a shop in Privoz [a big market in Odessa], where he sold grain and seeds.
Maria Yakovlevna Komarovskaya
Then rumors began about it, and then the famous 20th congress of the party took place that opened our eyes to the truth.
When Stalin died, we all cried a lot. We were so scared – what will happen to us now that the “father of nations” was gone? Nobody linked repression, arrests and fight against cosmopolitism with his name.
The word “kike” could be heard everywhere. People all over said that “kikes” did not fight in the war, but spent the war in Tashkent.
After the war the attitude towards the Jewish population changed radically. I remember our street cleaner Matrena Sergeyevna and her husband uncle Grisha did not even greet me when I returned to Kiev after the war. They just looked away. The word “kike” could be heard everywhere. People all over said that “kikes” did not fight in the war, but spent the war in Tashkent. All this talk did not touch me personally. I studied at a department with more than 100 students of different nationalities. And even though the “Doctors’ case” was discussed on radio and TV, even though anti-Semitic campaigns were launched all over the country, it did not touch us, the students of our department. Maybe due to our young age we treated it like something foreign to us. I almost never read newspapers and was far from politics. My parents were outraged – by quietly. But at that time everyone was afraid to express his or her opinion to what was going on.
My mother said that before the Revolution there were court hearings in Kiev that accused a Jew by the name of Beilis. This process was well known and became part of history. When that court hearing ended with the verdict of “non-guilty”, my mother’s friends from school – Russian girls – congratulated her on the fact that her fellow Jew was pronounced innocent. On the contrast with this, when it became clear that the Jewish doctors of the Kremlin were not guilty and that charges against them were false, nobody congratulated me or other Jews; nobody even reacted in any way.
My mother said that before the Revolution there were court hearings in Kiev that accused a Jew by the name of Beilis. This process was well known and became part of history. When that court hearing ended with the verdict of “non-guilty”, my mother’s friends from school – Russian girls – congratulated her on the fact that her fellow Jew was pronounced innocent. On the contrast with this, when it became clear that the Jewish doctors of the Kremlin were not guilty and that charges against them were false, nobody congratulated me or other Jews; nobody even reacted in any way.