We rented an apartment with three big rooms in a private house. There was a small kitchen. There was a real big stove with oven forks, wood and cast iron pots. Water was delivered to houses in barrels. There was a cellar with huge bottle green pieces of ice in it. There was food stored on them. The cellar was a very tempting place: there was sour cream in ceramic pots, milk and pelmeni dumplings. It was a very delicious cellar.
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Displaying 38131 - 38160 of 50826 results
Emilia Kotliar
In Kazan’ my mother worked in zhensoviet (women's council) [editor’s note: Women’s councils – departments, included in Party organs at the direction of the party Central Committee in 1918. Their members were women activists and their tasks included ideological work with women industrial employees and peasants with the aim of their socialist education. Reorganized in 1929] with education of Tatar women. They didn’t know Russian and were taught in likbez [12] schools.
My mother and father met in Vasilkov. After finishing the realschule my father couldn’t find a job near home. He found a job in Kazan’, about 720 km east of Moscow, my mother joined him there and they got married.
,
Before WW2
See text in interview
My mother and father gave up observing Jewish traditions and religion when they were young. This was the way it was at that time: the Revolution of 1917, when everything was breaking up and crashing, the routinely way of life was replaced with something different when new authorities were building up different ideology, propagating and forcing communism and atheism into people’s minds. Besides, I don’t think they would have found jobs had they remained religious. Soviet authorities did not appreciate religiosity and struggled against it [11] in every possible way. If my father had come to his plant with his kippah on and a beard and had begun to pray, can you imagine what it would have been like? Same with my mother. Although her grandfather was a Talmud scholar and she accompanied grandfather to the synagogue every day carrying his tallit for him she didn’t see anything beautiful in the life of her family regardless those traditional ceremonies. She didn’t see that it was a good life and therefore, she didn’t quite accept it. My parents and their brothers and sisters did not just nominally give up religion, they actually parted with it. Young people joined the revolution and began to study. They had nothing to lose. Most Jews were so poor that it could not be worse for them. Many finished cheder, but few could afford to go to yeshivah. Not all of them were smart enough to go into theoretical studies of the Talmud. Becoming a melamed? How many did a small town need? Two at the most. The rest of them had to take to trade or patching jackets or sewing? There were no vacancies in this little town and even skilled craftsmen earned little. Other towns also had their own coopers, tailors and tradesmen. Therefore, they rushed into revolution. A road to new life opened to them.
My father wasn’t a member of the Communist Party, though he sympathized with the revolutionary movement. He spoke at a meeting. I don’t know what Party he spoke for, but I believe it was an incidental matter since it wasn’t what he really was up to.
Before the revolution of 1917 grandmother Leya owned a store selling her products on credit for peanuts. She sold salt, matches, soap and herring. Villagers from a neighboring village liked doing shopping in Leya’s store. She even sold on credit to those who didn’t pay back their old debts. When Jewish pogroms began Ukrainian families gave shelter to Leya’s family and rescued her children. At their old age my grandmother and grandfather worked in a kolkhoz. My grandfather was a janitor and my grandmother worked in a kolkhoz canteen.
Grandfather Isaac was meek and kind. I almost shrink thinking about my grandfather. He was the best person in the family. He was very patient and his wife scolded him. She didn’t quite respect him for his being quiet and meek and was up in the clouds, though he did everything about the house. He was very handy. I don’t know what he did before the revolution of 1917 [5], but afterward he worked as a janitor in a kolkhoz [6].
A ‘golden son-in-law’ was one involved only in spiritual activities studying the Talmud and his wife’s family was to provide for him. Since my great grandfather was very poor he couldn’t support this kind of a son-in-law and Leya had to marry Isaac Vaisman, my grandfather, who was as poor as she was. This happened approximately in 1900. Of course, they had a traditional wedding and it couldn’t have been otherwise at that time.
My maternal great grandfather’s name was Vigdor. Regretfully, I don’t know his last name. He lived in Vasilkov and was a very bright person. He was a melamed. Besides, he was involved in various public activities. His wife died young leaving him with 6 children. He never remarried. His older daughter Leya, my grandmother, became a housewife. Vigdor taught Talmud in cheder. Studying Talmud was his favorite pastime. He was very fond of it. Vigdor was the authority of his community. He was very smart and his neighbors often addressed him with their problems, when there was a dispute, or they wanted to share heritage or had routinely problems. Grandfather judged them objectively. He studied Talmud ‘for the development of brains’ and read religious books. At his old age he worked at a slaughterhouse where he issued receipts for one kopeck. This was a slaughterhouse that belonged to the synagogue where they slaughtered poultry in accordance with kashrut rules. He was sitting behind his counter having coins and receipts in front of him and a Talmud on his lap. Women even felt hurt that he didn’t look at them issuing those receipts. He was plunged into his book. In 1920 white guard officers [3] during a pogrom [4] killed him. When they were shooting him, he was an old man with one leg.
There was a synagogue and a Jewish community in Vasilkov.
Undoubtedly, they observed all Jewish traditions in the past times.
My father studied in a realschule [1].
My paternal grandfather’s name was Efraim Kotliar. His family led a patriarchal way of life. They were respected people in the town. My grandfather was wealthy. He owned a business. He was a glasscutter and made frames.
Lazar Sherishevskiy
From newspapers we knew about indictment of doctors [40] for making wrong diagnoses. We didn’t believe this knowing how indictments were fabricated.
In 1953 we heard on the radio that Stalin died. I didn’t feel sad about it, but I was concerned. We were all afraid of life to get worse.
Frankly speaking, I felt some concerns about the establishment of Israel. Realized what a response of the Soviet Union might be. I heard about it on the radio in our barrack in the camp in 1948. I thought it was good. Then I heard that Golda Meir became the head of this state. Then prisoners indicted of Zionism, bourgeois nationalism and cosmopolitism started to arrive in the camp.
I married Gelia Nikovina in Salekhard. She was Russian. She was born in Vologda in 1925. We registered our marriage in a registry office and began our life together. Gelia’s father perished at the front, and her mother died before the war. She was the only daughter of her parents. She moved to Salekhard from Moscow. She served as a medical nurse at the front and later finished a College of Culture [higher educational institution for workers of culture and art: producers, actors, theater administration employees etc.] and had a job assignment [41] of a library director in the north. When she married me, she was expelled from the party, but resumed her membership after I was rehabilitated.
After Stalin died, there was an amnesty in late March 1953. The amnesty released the political prisoners whose sentence was under 5 years. I obtained a passport and moved to Gorkiy with my wife.
In Gorkiy I entered the University, but before I sent a telegram to the Minister of Education to issue me a permit to take entrance exams since the university management was reluctant to accept my documents considering my biography and my being a Jew. The Minister sent them a directive to allow me to take exams. I passed my exams with ‘5’ marks [top marks] and they had to admit me. I finished the philological Faculty well. I started to have my works published. I couldn’t even think about post-graduate studies considering the booming state anti-Semitism. We were hard up at the time. I received a stipend and my wife received her very low salary of a librarian. After the University I got a job assignment to the ‘Gorkovskiy rabochiy’ newspaper [‘the Gorkiy worker’], a central newspaper in Gorkiy where I worked for about 1.5 years. Then I was forced to quit, not without a Jewish context. Nobody told me anything directly, but there were no Jewish employees in central newspapers. There might have been an unspoken direction about it, I don’t know, but the fact is, there were no Jewish employees. I became a free lance writer. I wrote for newspapers and TV and earned my living thus. Some time later my books were published and I joined the union of writers.
In 1968 I remarried. My second wife Margarita Nogteva is Russian. She was born in Gorkiy in 1936. She kept her surname. She was a poet and a journalist with a standing in literature. We met in the university. In 1969 our daughter Debora was born. Margarita gave her this name.She was reading the New Testament and liked the image of Debora, a prophetess and poetess. [Debora is a character in the Old Testament.] So we named our daughter after the Biblical character. We decided that Debora should have the surname of her mother. My wife had a typical Russian surname and we knew that our daughter will have an easier life having her surname, it would be easier for her to enter a college and she would not face the booming anti-Semitism. We exchanged my wife’s apartment in Gorkiy for a one in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow. Moscow welcomed me. I found a job to be able to support the family. I translated poems and had 50 books of my translations published. I know Ukrainian and Belarussian. I also had my poems published, but it was hard. My books began to be published in 1980 .
Our daughter married Ivan Kolomyiets and adopted his surname. Her husband is Ukrainian. Debora finished a Pedagogical College, when perestroika [42] began. She worked at school for over a year and also studied management. After finishing this 2-year course she received a diploma. She also studied English. She is deputy director in a private company and she is doing well.
I was enthusiastic about perestroika in the 1980s at first like many others. I had few poems about perestroika. One of them is published continuously: ‘Refraction’, about a direct ray that refracts and gets to wrong destinations from where it was intended. I didn’t have illusions. I’ve never quite believed that we would manage to build a law-based state.
I didn’t quite support all this excitement about Yeltsin, but I tried to enjoy the few freedoms and publish what I couldn’t publish before. Thanks to perestroika people of my fate, i.e., those who were arrested and suffered during the Stalin’s period got some support. The ‘Memorial’ community of former political prisoners was established. I was one of the first members of the working group of this society. I even have a certificate of this society issued in 1988 and signed by A. Sakharov [43]. I am still involved in its activities. The Memorial society’s goal was to restore the hidden events of the Soviet period and disclose the truth about persecution, terror and discrimination. It’s a historical/literature society. The structure include few strands: uniting former prisoners and their successors having the status of those who suffered from political persecution. They have their own organization. There is also a historical unit in the Memorial, working with archives, documents, facts, memories. And there is also a legal center fighting for human rights.
Perestroika disclosed the crimes of the past – I supported this and tried to take part in its activities. However, I knew that ‘one must spoil before one spins’. So, when the economic situation grew worse and people grew miserably poor, while the others grew rich, I started writing epigrams. I collected them in a book of my ironic comments regarding the totalitarian past and the forthcoming market economy and market ideology.
Publishing became easier: previously there were only state publishing houses and the ideological censorship, but when it was canceled, it became possible to publish books, but on market terms, though.
Perestroika disclosed the crimes of the past – I supported this and tried to take part in its activities. However, I knew that ‘one must spoil before one spins’. So, when the economic situation grew worse and people grew miserably poor, while the others grew rich, I started writing epigrams. I collected them in a book of my ironic comments regarding the totalitarian past and the forthcoming market economy and market ideology.
Publishing became easier: previously there were only state publishing houses and the ideological censorship, but when it was canceled, it became possible to publish books, but on market terms, though.
I’ve always identified myself as a Jew. My father implanted the knowledge of Jewish history and Jewish culture in me, when I was a child. Besides, this self-identification became very acute in 1933, when Hitler came to power and Europe was smashed by a huge wave of anti-Semitism. At school I suffered more being the son of an arrested man rather than being a Jew. It was the same during the war, when I was in a camp and sensed the breath of state anti-Semitism in the 1950s, - 60s, when I started working in newspapers after graduating from the university. I sensed the official trend ‘to stop’, to not admit, ‘to not allow’. I also felt this moving to Moscow in the 1970s. Some publishers did not publish Jews in principal and openly expressed their anti-Semitic positions.
Feeling myself as a person 5raised on the Russian and partially Jewish culture I do not believe there exist exclusive nations. I wrote: ‘There are no God chosen nations in the world, there God chosen people’. I do not believe in any exclusiveness giving one nation the right to believe they were higher and had the right to dictate. This refers to all. I also reject anti-Semitism decisively. Like any other national hostility.
Feeling myself as a person 5raised on the Russian and partially Jewish culture I do not believe there exist exclusive nations. I wrote: ‘There are no God chosen nations in the world, there God chosen people’. I do not believe in any exclusiveness giving one nation the right to believe they were higher and had the right to dictate. This refers to all. I also reject anti-Semitism decisively. Like any other national hostility.
I studied well at school and was fond of literature and poetry and wrote poems. There were many Jews in my class. There were so many Jews in our neighborhood that there was even a Jewish school in our street. I went to a Russian school: we spoke Russian at home and I didn’t know Yiddish. Besides, my parents wanted me to continue education after school, and this was only provided in Russian, which was the state language.
Many of my schoolmates came from more religious families than mine. My classmate’s brother was interested in Zionism [20]. His parents were members of this movement. They were the Lebedinskiys family. They had 3 children: son Boruch, Saul and Moisey. Moisey was my classmate and his brothers Saul and Shulia – this was how we addressed him, were also my friends. Saul had Zionist views. He said that all Jews had to move to Palestine. It only made me smile since I understood this was impossible and didn’t want to go anywhere above all.
My other friend became a world-known poet: he was Emmanuel Mandel. Later he had a literature pseudonym of Naum Korzhavin [Naum Korzhavin, born in Kiev in 1925, a poet and playwright. In 1947 was arrested for poems against Stalin and his regime. 1947 - 1952 was in exile in Siberia. In 1973 was expelled from the Union of writers and emigrated from the USSR and now lives in the USA].
Here was also a Jewish theater in Kiev, a Jewish music ensemble led by Zinoviy Shulman, a former cantor, a Jewish singer. There were two wonderful Jewish singers: Naum Epelbaum and Zinoviy Shulman. In the late 1940s during struggle against cosmopolitism [22] Soviet authorities destroyed all their records.
However, my parents didn’t take me to the Jewish theater or Jewish concerts. They took me to the Russian theaters to see operas. My father was very fond of opera. When I was six, he took me to the Kiev Opera Theater. The first opera I heard was Faust. We also went to see the ‘Demon’ and ‘Yevgeniy Onegin’. My father taught me culture. Only when I grew up I understood what an interesting man he was. Mama also knew literature and music and could play the piano. She had a collection of scores. Mama was a kind person. I learned to play the piano for about two years, when my father could pay for it. Later, in the GULAG [23], I benefited from this ability by playing in the prisoners’ theater.
In 1938 during the period of arrests [24], my father was arrested and executed. I got to know that he was executed only 50 years later. At that time I only knew that my father had problems at work and that he was arrested. I wished I could believe this was a mistake, they would find out and my father would return home. We lived in a communal apartment [25] in Kiev that we shared with two other families. When the capital of Ukraine moved from Kharkov to Kiev in 1934 [before 1934 Kharkov was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, in 1934 the Government of the USSR decided to move the capital to Kiev. All governmental structures moved to Kiev as well], 2 party officials from Kharkov became our co-tenants in this apartment. One of them Golyi, a Party Central Committee official, a decent and honest man, lived in one room, and Claudia Zakharovna, a young woman, who worked in the Komsomol Central Committee [26] of Ukraine, and her daughter lived in another room. We were friends. First Golyi was arrested and then, one night in summer 1938, my father and this lady were arrested. Perhaps they beat and tortured Golyi trying to make him confess who else he had involved in the anti-Soviet group and he must have named his colleagues and neighbors. The lady was released and I met with her later. Golyi must have been executed. My father was convicted of anti-Soviet activities and executed. What they wrote there was: ‘for anti-Soviet activities aimed at the detriment of the economy and disruption of Soviet production’. They didn’t give much thought to the wording, it never occurred to them that one day relatives would get access to these files. Besides, there were millions of innocent people put on this conveyor, exterminated and exiled without trials or investigations, so they didn’t care much about definitions of crimes. Besides, what could they accuse him of? He was ah honest person and a skilled employee. It was just that the policy was aimed at the extermination of the best individuals. Golyi was also innocent, but we would never be able to find out why he gave the names of his neighbors, and besides – did he? This is what I assume. Perhaps, somebody else reported on my father … I received notifications in the 1990s. My mother and I managed to have my father rehabilitated posthumously [27].