Tag #120554 - Interview #89576 (Tobijas Jafetas)

My father finished cheder and went to the Jewish school. He was good at trading since his early years. He started selling pencils, notebooks and other stationery; helping his parents and following his older brother’s example. By 1918 he became a merchant of Guild I [6] which gave him the right to reside in capital towns. He lived in Moscow. In the late 1920s my father met my future mother in Riga or in Moscow. This was the gloomy period of the [Russian] Revolution [of 1917] [7], destruction and expropriation process, which resulted in poverty at best and at the worst it meant exile and death. Therefore, immediately after they got married – they didn’t have a traditional Jewish wedding considering the hardships of this time – my parents moved to Berlin in 1920.