Tag #140021 - Interview #90530 (Ella Lukatskaya)

In 1928 my mother met her future husband and my father Aizik Iosifovich Lukatskiy. He was one year younger than my mother. He came to Kiev from a small Jewish town of Smela in the vicinity of Cherkassy. His friends told my mother that he was a great patriot of his town. He used to say that it was the best place in the world, although he had a difficult childhood.

Actually his whole family died during one of the pogroms in 1905-10. Only his cousins stayed alive. Little Aizek went to the founding home at the synagogue in Smela. He grew an orphan. He finished primary Jewish school there. My mother said that he knew Hebrew well and that he read Torah, but this education didn’t last in his life. The revolution turned him into a convinced Communist, atheist and internationalist. He finished the Communist Institute like my mother and became a professional Communist party officer. Later he somehow learned a profession of radio operator and cryptographer.

We didn’t know anything about his relatives, and in 1947 his cousin Eva Lvovna Lukatskaya found us all of a sudden. She was living with her daughter Shurochka in Moscow. Eva has died and Shurochka Lukatskaya lives in Germany now.