Tag #132846 - Interview #78145 (Simon Gutman)

In 1917 daddy took us from Pavlovski Posad to a resort on the coast of the Azov sea, in Berdyansk, for six weeks, and there we ended up staying for four years - during the revolution [see Russian Revolution of 1917] [1] and the Civil War [2] in Russia. We lived poorly, having taken to Berdyansk almost nothing, only my mother's fur coat, a coat of seal skin, which we sold, and just enough food for the winter. Daddy wasn't a religious man, but it was a generally accepted rule to visit the synagogue. When he occasionally went to Berdyansk, where there was a choral synagogue, he used to attend the service. He had a special silk cloak. I remember, he would point towards us in the synagogue and say in Yiddish, 'These are the performers of my funeral rites'.