These are my parents, Isaac and Reizl Shraibman. This photo was taken in a Kishinev photo shop in 1969.
My papa was born in the 1880s during the tsarist rule. He could read and write in Yiddish, but he had no profession. He also knew Romanian and some Russian. He had to support the household after my grandfather died. In winter he went around villages working for tobacco producers. He sorted out the tobacco, had very little sleep – two or three hours per day. He came back home in spring before Pesach. Papa was very kind, taciturn, reserved and not a merry person at all. I thought he was handsome. I remember him with and without a beard. I liked him, when he didn’t have a beard. He looked younger then. He always covered his head. He didn’t go to the synagogue on Sabbath, but he did on holidays. He and my mother were neighbors and fell in love with each other. Mama always said they were very much in love and had married for love.
My mama was born in Vadul-Rashkov in 1892. She finished elementary school and two grades of secondary school. Mama was beautiful. She had long thick hair, blue eyes and extraordinarily soft skin. She had a good sense of humor and laughed a lot. Mama loved my father and us, her children, and always said that love was most important of all things in life.
My parents got married when they were 19-20 years old. They had a Jewish wedding with a chuppah. They rented an apartment. After the wedding my father opened a store and Mama was a housewife. I was born in Vadul-Rashkov in 1913. My parents had ten children. After me my brother Isrul, named after Mama’s brother, was born. Then came Iosif, Buzia, Feiga, Shapseh, Luba, Zisl [Zina], Hana [Anna] and Ida. Shapseh and Luba died in infancy, Feiga died at the age of ten, when she was at school and even wrote poems.
During the war my father, mother and younger sisters Zina, Hana and Ida found us in Uzbekistan. In 1945 Mama, Papa and my sisters also returned to Kishinev from Uzbekistan. Mama and Papa lived with my childless younger sister Ida and her husband. Papa and Mama observed Jewish traditions after the war. They always had matzah on Pesach. They fasted on Yom Kippur and went to the synagogue. My father died in 1969. My mother died at the age of 89, in 1980. We buried her at the Jewish cemetery beside my father's grave and I recited the Kaddish. My father had died eleven years before that.
