This is a formal portrait of my mother, Mariam Moiseyevna Berdichevskaya Levenberg, taken in 1913 when she was 22 . She is posing with an anchor.
My mother was born in 1891 in the village of Buzovka near of Uman. She was the youngest of the four surviving children of my grandfather Moishe Berdichevskiy and his first wife, Reizl. Grandmother was born about 1862. She was an orphan and married my grandfather at 16. She died from a heart attack when she was 36 or 37.
My mother was raised by her stepmother, grandfather's second wife Mariam, with whom he had seven children.
My mother told me that grandfather's family was religious. They celebrated all the holidays and followed all the rules. Every Saturday one of the children used to take some food and money to the poor Jews to help them celebrate the Shabbath. My father , Ovsei Tsalevich Levenberg , was a tutor who came to give lessons to the children in my grandfather's family.
