This is a photograph of my wife Devora Finchelstein on the occasion of the festivity at the end of the school year. She received a prize, you can see that she was awarded 1st prize on that occasion and she received a coronet. The photograph was taken in 1937 at the Select photo studio. It was a Jewish photo studio, a great photographer worked there, he enjoyed a good reputation even throughout the country. In any case, he was the best photographer in Iasi. The entire neighborhood knew him as "der stimer fotograf" [Yiddish: the dumb photographer]. Back then, there were only a few studios in Iasi which processed photographs for weddings and other occasions.
My wife's maiden name was Devora Faierstein. She too was born in Iasi, in January 1925. We met for the first time in our Jewish neighborhood, I fell in love with her and to this age, after 56 years of marriage, I'm still in love with her. When I come home and ring the doorbell, and she opens the door for me, it's as if a spotlight lights up the entire house. When I was going to work in the morning and by the time I returned home, I'd start missing her as I didn't see her all day long.
My wife's family situation wasn't very different [from ours]. They were 5 children, 3 girls and 2 boys. The girls went to school during roughly the same period. Her mother wanted all her girls to be elegant and she woke up at the crack of dawn to iron their school uniforms. The uniforms were washed and the collars were starched, and in order for them not to wear their great coats over the collars, they went to school with the collar placed in a book and they attached it once they arrived at school. The girls wore their hair long, and their mother had to braid it into plaits and iron their bows.
