This is me, Boris Molodetski, during a walking tour. This photo was taken in the Carpathian Mountains in 1974.
I met my wife Lidia Vdovina in 1947 in the army hospital, and we got married two years later. Lidia is Russian. In 1969 I demobilized from the army and moved to Odessa with my family: my wife Lidia, my son Grisha and my daughter Zoya. We came to live with my mother. Two years later I received an apartment and offered my mother to live with us, but she said she wanted to live alone. She moved in with us in 1975 in a five-bedroom apartment on the 9th floor of a building in Kotovskiy district. My mother died of gullet cancer four years later in 1979. We buried her in the Tairovskoye cemetery. I worked as a surgeon urologist in town hospital #8, and then I changed work several times, but I always had this same position. I had four articles published and did scientific work.
In the 1980s many of my acquaintances emigrated. Their departures were like funerals. We knew that there was hardly any chance to see each other again. When my great nephew Marik Shechterman, aunt Surah's grandson, was leaving I didn't even go to the railway station to say good bye to him. I believed that we would be all photographed and later have problems. So much scared we were then. My wife and I never considered departure since we couldn't imagine life anywhere, but in Odessa.
In the 1970-80s I gradually began to develop a critical attitude toward life and rules in our country. I was interested in politics and subscribed to at least 10 newspapers and magazines reading and analyzing and situation. I understood that this wasn't a socialist system, but a dictatorship of the ruling Party clique. In 1977 my wife and I visited aunt Minna in America and I saw how much worse our life was. Since we worked for state structures or material situation was stable. We didn't have any additional earnings, but we managed on what we had. Lidia worked as senior medical nurse in the physical therapy department. She was a very good massager and a high skilled trainer of therapeutic exercises. Every year my wife and I spent vacations hitchhiking. In 1980-83 we went on horse riding trips to the Altay mountains. We traveled to Bashkiria, Georgia, Subcarpathia, Yerevan and Petersburg. We bought tours to Czechoslovakia, Germany and Poland.
