Tag #128808 - Interview #78169 (rachel randvee)

My father was born in 1895. He finished cheder in Kreizburg; his mother tongue was Yiddish. He wasn't very proficient in other languages - Russian, Latvian, German and then Estonian. To help his mother he started working at a young age. At first, he was a salesman's apprentice in a shop in Kreizburg, and later he worked as a salesman in a fabric shop in Riga for several years. At the end of 1916 my father went to St. Petersburg [called Petrograd between 1917 and 1924], where his elder sister Sofia and her family lived. He intended to look for a job there. Petrograd was on the eve of revolution - there were mass-meetings, strikes, and plundering. My father didn't like this at all - he liked order in all things - and after a few months he decided to return to Latvia. On his way to Riga he stopped in the small Estonian city of Tartu. He liked the city - it was a quiet, neat place with a Jewish community and, which was essential for my father, it had a synagogue. One Saturday, while visiting the synagogue, a beautiful young lady attracted his attention. They were soon introduced to each other. That's how my father met his future wife, my mother, Hesse Heiman.