Zinaida Dremlug with her family

Zinaida Dremlug with her family

This photo was taken in 1950s in Bologoye.

Here you see me and part of my family: my mother Zinaida (she stands third from left), my father Matvey (third from right), my sisters Sophia (in the very center) and Lilia (first from left), Boris (second from left), son of my sister Sophia and Mikhail (in the first row, from the right side), son of father's cousin Yakov.

Here you can also see my husband Valentine (first from right) and me (second from right). We all stand on the stairs, leading to our house. We (me and my husband) came to visit, because we lived in Leningrad in those times. Lilia lived together with our parents, and Sophia came to visit too.

My sister Sophia (Sarah Alperovitch, in her passport) was born on May, the 25th of 1926; we lived in Valdasi. As a matter of fact, she was a madcap; she'd better be a boy, not a girl. She was playing with boys, run and fought;

Sophia never was calm, never sat and always hurried somewhere. She studied worse than I, but, after graduation from school, she came to Leningrad and entered the faculty of History in 'Gertzenovsky' [the Pedagogical Institute, named after Gertzen, Russian revolutionary, writer and philosopher].

Anyway, she didn't finish the Institute as she's got married. Her husband Alexander is a sailor, and they sent him to the North and they never came back to Leningrad. They have two children: Boris and Olga, they both live in Vladivostok.

Lilia (Lilia Matveevna Danilova) my other sister was born on February, the 19th of 1941. Mother wasn't very young woman, she was forty one, but dad wanted a boy. So they decided to keep a child, when she's got pregnant.

We grew up already and thought to leave, and they didn't wish to stay alone… I remember why they called her Lilia. There was one Jewish family in Bologoye, parents and three daughters. And one of them, Lilia, was a real beauty, so I looked at her and went jealous.

In her honor I named Lilia, my sister: she was black and I believed that she will be as beautiful. Lilia grew mainly in Dad's absence, without a father: she was four, when Dad came back from the front in 1945.

And then, while she studied in the ninth grade, father died. She was less lively than we were. Mother always said: 'Why Lilia is so sad?' And she asked us (me and Sophia): 'Why you are so beautiful, and I'm not like you?'

When I studied on the third course of Institute, in 1946 father bought a voucher to the health resort "Shirokoe", voucher, happy from all points of view. They settled me in a club, called 'monkey place'. And my future husband Valentine Dremlug lived there too.

We married in January of 1947. First there was a wedding without any registration, and then we went to ZAGS and registered our relations.

My father didn't like my husband at first, not because he was not Jewish, but due to that fact that he was not tall and strong man. He even blamed my mother, who went to Leningrad to check my choice before the wedding took place. But later they had normal relations, and we never had any troubles because of his nationality.

My husband, Valentine, entered the Gidrography Institute even before the World War II but he didn't have any chance to graduate. He passed his finals in Krasnoyarsk [big city in Siberia].

After the war had been finished, he went to get a PhD degree in Leningrad; in 1949 he fulfilled his academic program and got a job of the head of sub-faculty.

He worked in that Highest Arctic College till he was retired in 1980s. He was assistant professor there and read lectures.

In 1950s mother still lived in Bologoye together with my ad and sister Lilia. She moved later, in 1960s, after my father died in 1956 from some cancer decease.

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