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My mother, Maria Ortenberg, was born in 1898 in Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia, which was part of the Russian Empire. Mother's father, my grandfather Iosif Ortenberg, was born around 1860. There was a legend in my grandfather's family, which my mother's brother, Abram, passed on to my husband and me as our wedding gift. He wrote in his congratulatory letter to us, that he wished he could give us something more as a wedding present, but that because he was poor, the family legend was all that he had to give. The legend says that my great-grandfather, Pinhus Ortenberg, a teacher, was the first to bring an electric bulb to Vinnitsa from Europe. This same man had a friend who lost his fortune in a card game. My great- grandfather covered his friend's card debt, thereby dragging his own family into poverty. The Tzaddik of Vinnitsa cursed my great-grandfather, saying that there would be no riches in his family, but sweetened the curse somewhat with the blessing that no one in the family would die a violent death. The Tzaddik's curse and blessing held true for over one hundred years.
My grandfather had two brothers, Lazar and Wolf Ortenberg, and a sister, Leia. My grandfather's family was very musical. Lazar was an amateur musician, and played the violin very well. He was a friend of the great Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov, whom he had met in St. Petersburg, and with whom he corresponded by letter. Lazar had a daughter, Sarrah, who married a famous Soviet commander and hero of the Civil War, a Jew by the name of Iona Yakir. Yakir was arrested on June 11, 1937. Yakir, Sarrah, their 14-year-old son Pyotr (nicknamed Petia), and Sarrah's father, lived in Kirov Street in Kiev. On the day Yakir was arrested, the authorities conducted a horrible search of their apartment. They broke the walls, furniture and floors looking for weapons and documents with which to implicate Iona as having contacts with foreign intelligence agencies, a false accusation. Yakir's son, Petia, showed them a toy gun that Iona had once brought him from Berlin when he returned from a business trip there. The entire family were arrested and taken to Astrakhan. Lazar died on the way. Sarrah was sentenced to 10 years in prison camps, and later, ten more years. Fourteen-year-old Petia was also arrested, but released in Sverdlovsk after 5 years. All the clothing he possessed was his underwear and a tyubeteika cap in which he kept his discharge papers. Luckily, on that very same day, he met some acquaintances who were in Sverdlovsk during the evacuation. They gave him some clothing, and in the evening they all went to the Musical Comedy Theater. Unfortunately, the first man Petia saw in the theater was the warden of the prison Petia had just left. Petia was immediately rearrested. This time he was charged with trying to cross the border into Iran. Petia demanded to be escorted to Beria. His request was satisfied, but when Beria began to revile Petia's father, Iona Yakir, Petia lost his temper and threw an inkpot at Beria. Petia asked to be sent to the front, but was refused. As we found out later, Stalin had decided to send Petia to the saboteurs' school. He was sent to the German rear twice, and completed his tasks successfully. Before sending him there for the third time, the authorities said to him that he would either die or come back a Hero of the Soviet Union. He fulfilled his task and returned. Afterwards, he was sent to penal exile at a gold mine. Petia was rehabilitated and returned from exile around 1955. He visited us in Kiev. I asked him once: "What would you do to Stalin if you got him?" And he replied, "Nothing. I would send him to where I was, and I would be his jailer until the end of his days." Sarrah returned from prison camp around the same time. She received a small two-room apartment in Moscow, and lived there until her death in 1977.
I have no information concerning Wolf Ortenberg, my grandfather's second brother. I believe he died long before the Revolution. His wife Leya, who resumed her maiden name Monastyrskaya after her husband's death, died in Odessa after the evacuation. She had four children. One of them, Pyotr Monastyrskiy, lives in the town of Kuibyshev, now known as Samara. He is a producer and is a People's Artist of the Soviet Union.
My grandfather Iosif Ortenberg, born in 1860, was also very fond of music. I don't know how he met my grandmother, but they married in Kishinev in 1880. Around 1905, their family moved to Odessa. My grandfather was a teacher. His students took classes at his home. My grandfather provided all his children with a good education. His daughters finished grammar school and his sons received further education. My grandfather was a man of advanced ideas for his time. He gave all his children a very good modern upbringing. Their family wasn't religious. Like her husband, my grandmother, Dora (maiden name - Korduner), was a woman of the world. She even smoked long, thin cigarettes. However, my mother told me that my grandmother never smoked on Saturdays. This was probably her tribute to the Jewish traditions. My grandfather rarely visited the synagogue, but he used to say that such visits helped him to keep the family together. Although the family wasn't religious, they celebrated the main Jewish holidays - Pesach, Purim and Hanukkah. The children were not at all religious. There were seven children in all, just as in my father's family. My grandmother Dora gave birth to a baby every two or two and a half years. Their large family rented a big apartment in the center of the city. In about 1905, Odessa was swept with a surge of pogroms. The janitor of the building where the family lived did not allow the thugs to enter their apartment, and the family stayed holed up there for several days. This janitor was a Ukrainian. He brought the family everything they needed. He adored my grandfather. After the Revolution, my grandfather began to work as Director of the Kindergarten at the House of Doctors. My cousins and I attended this same kindergarten. My grandfather worked there up until his last days. He died from a heart attack in 1934.
The oldest among the children was Abram, born around 1884. Abram finished high school in Kiev, and then was sent by my grandfather to the Netherlands to continue his studies. In 1914 Abram defended his thesis in economics there, and received a job offer. But then WWI began, My grandmother requested that all her children be at home. At that time, children obeyed their parents unconditionally, and so Abram returned to Odessa. In the early 1920s he worked on the Soviet farm there (he was a secretary of science), and introduced my father to his family. Abram married. He has two children, Naum and Larissa. Naum suffered much during the Stalinist years. During the war he was in the army, stationed in Iran as a topographer. After the war, he went to Moscow and submitted his application to the Kuibyshev Military Engineering Academy. There was a question in this application form about relatives abroad that Abram answered as "my father's brother is in Rumania," but nobody knew where Abram's younger brother was.
There also was a question in this form about any family members who had been repressed. Abram wrote that his aunt and her husband Yakir had been. As a result of these honest answers, Abram was summoned to the political department where he was advised to tear up the form he had submitted, and to mention nothing of the above in the new form that he was obliged to complete. In this way, he was able to enroll in the Academy. Abram was a very successful student. But when the period of struggle against the cosmopolitans began in 1949, Abram was again called to the political department and ordered to leave Moscow on 48 hours notice. He spent many years working in the Kalmyk steppes as a topographer. He came to Sterlitamak for three weeks every year to formulate the results of his surveys. Abram died in 1953, before his son Naum returned from exile. Later, Naum was allowed to move to Lithuania where he defended his thesis on land surveying. In the mid-1970s, Naum moved to Moscow, and in 1987 he emigrated to the USA with his family. He lives in San Francisco, and his sister Larissa lives there too.
The next son in the Ortenberg family was Grigoriy ("Grisha"), born in 1886. Grigoriy married a wealthy Jewish girl named Maria. It was a love match. In 1922, at the end of the Civil War, Uncle Grisha and his wife, along with their son Emil and Maria's four sisters, left for Bucharest via Constantinople on the last boat. Grisha took all the family's jewels and diamonds with him. In Bucharest, the girls opened a café that went broke, and the family's finances suffered. Grisha got a job as an economist at a big textile factory. His son Emil managed to graduate from a French college. During the war, the owner of the factory where Grisha worked helped Emil to avoid arrest. Emil and his father were lucky to remain safely in Bucharest until the Soviet Army liberated the country from the fascists. The owner of the factory escaped to France, leaving all his business to Grisha. When the first Soviet Consul arrived in Bucharest, Grisha gave him the key to the textile factory. Once more, the family could hardly make ends meet. In 1957, Uncle Grisha came to Odessa. We collected money for his return ticket. He died in Bucharest around 1970. After his death, Emil went to live with his mother's brother in Brussels. Emil was married to the sister of the Soviet Jewish writer Isaak Babel, who had emigrated to Brussels during the Revolution. Babel owned a big pharmaceutical company that he wished to bequeath to Emil, but Emil told him that Ortenbergs never dealt with commerce, and that it would turn to no good, anyway. From Brussels, Emil moved to Paris, where he now lives.
The next Ortenberg in the family was my mother's sister, Polina. Polina married Alexandr Kangun, a revolutionarys who came from a large Jewish family. Until recently, there was a Kangun Street in Odessa. It was named after Kangun's brothers, Monia and Lyova, who perished in Odessa during the Civil War. Polina and Alexandr adopted a girl. She was half-Greek and half-Jewish. Her name was Eraclia. During WWII Polina was evacuated. She died in Odessa in 1968.
After Polina, came Akiva. Sometime during the Soviet era, he changed his name to Nikolay. Nikolay was very tall. He served in the grenadier regiment in the tsarist army in Moscow. The members of this grenadier regiment appeared at the Bolshoi Opera as supernumeraries in the crowd scenes of operas such as "Life for the Tsar," and "Boris Godunov," and Nikolai had the opportunity to stand on the stage beside the great bass, Chaliapin. During the Soviet years, Nikolay was Chief Engineer of the port of Odessa.
The next child after Nikolay was Arnold. During the Soviet years, he was Chief Engineer of Odessa's canned food factory.
The youngest in the family was Iliozar. He was born after my mother. Iliozar was exceptionally good at music. My mother took him to Pyotr Solomonovich Stoliarskiy, a wonderful violin teacher. This man was semi-literate and spoke poor Russian, because, being Jewish, his mother tongue was Yiddish, but he was a God-gifted teacher. He was the first teacher of the renowned violinists David Oistrach, Lisa Gilels, Misha Fichtengolts, and many, many others. Iliozar studied at the Odessa Conservatory, and worked at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. He requested permission from Lunacharskiy to continue his education in Berlin, and moved toBerlin for his post-graduate studies. His teacher in Berlin was Professor Gesse. Later this teacher became a member of the Nazi party. In Germany, Iliozar changed his name to Elgar. In 1928 my grandfather and grandmother obtained a visa to visit Iliozar in Germany, but on the eve of their departure, my grandmother suffered a stroke, and died on February 28, 1928. My grandfather went to Germany in 1929 with my mother's older sister, Polina. Later, in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, a German newspaper published an article by Dr. Goebbels asking "for how long shall the blue- eyed Jew from Odessa who has the nickname Elgar charm the Third Reich with his tunes?" It was possible to publish one's denial in the newspapers at that time. Iliozar (Elgar) published a short denial saying that he had never concealed his origin or his Jewish identity, and that he was born and would die a Jew. By that time Iliozar had married Tamara Kogan, a Jewish girl, in Berlin. Her father was a companion of Lenin's who emigrated to France when Lenin died in 1924. After Iliozar and Tamara witnessed the anti- Semitic riot known as "Crystal Night," they ran away to Tamara's relatives in Paris. In Paris my uncle organized a string quartet consisting of four Russian Jews, all four of whom were mobilized into the French army even before the Nazis arrived. My Uncle Iliozar went on a tour to the USA with his string quartet. Later, he received a Legion of Honor Order from Errieau, France's Minister of Culture, for the propagation of French art in America. It never occurred to anybody that French art was popularized by four Jews from Russia. However, by then they had become French citizens. In 1939 Hitler attacked France. My uncle said that they all had to leave, but he wanted to the rest of the family, his wife's sister, Tamara, and her husband Leon to be able to leave as well. This caused some delay with the departure. When Hitler was almost in Paris my uncle closed the windows of the apartment and turned on the gas. He didn't want the Germans to catch him alive. Tamara managed to open the windows before it was too late, and they all fled to the south of France, almost penniless. In Marsailles they boarded a ship going to America. They arrived in America with one dollar in their pocket. My Uncle Iliozar was soon offered a job on American radio. He worked there for a long time, and subsequently became second violinist in the "Budapest Quartet," a group whose reputation as the best quartet in the world was undisputed. The first violinist and founder of the quartet was a Hungarian.
Before 1937, Abram corresponded with his brothers Grigoriy and Iliozar who both lived abroad. They were forced to terminate their correspondence due to repression, arrests and the "iron curtain." Around 1948-50, we heard by chance that Aron was still alive. One of Aunt Polia's neighbors brought her a copy of a magazine that had a picture of Iliozar with his Budapest quartet. However, we were only able to meet in 1969, when my Uncle Iliozar, who had changed his name to Edgar in America, visited the Soviet Union. In 1968 he sent a card to Aunt Polia telling her that he was coming to the Soviet Union with his wife. Polia, then 80 years old, ran to inform her relatives about his arrival. On the way, she was involved in a bicycle accident and died. I didn't tell my mother and Uncle Iliozar about Aunt Polia's death right away, but I had to inform Uncle Iliozar before his arrival. I shall never forget Uncle Iliozar's meeting with my mother in 1969. Uncle Iliozar liked me a lot. He didn't have children of his own. He visited Kiev many times afterward, and I went to visit him in America. After he stopped playing concerts, he became a professor at a College of Music in Philadelphia and gave Master Classes in Europe and around the USA. Iliozar died in 1996 at the age of 96, of sound mind. On his 95th birthday the year before, the mayor of Philadelphia came to greet him, and declared him a Citizen of Honor of Philadelphia, saying that he enriched this town and the entire United States with his music.
My mother was born in Kishinev in 1898. She studied at an Odessa grammar school. In 1922 she met my father and married him on June 22, 1923. They had a civil registration ceremony. Although my father grew up in the family of a rabbi, he wasn't religious, and didn't observe any Jewish traditions. He knew Yiddish, but he and my mother spoke only Russian at home. They only used words Yiddish words to emphasize or give special coloring to what they wanted to say, but I didn't understand that language. I was born in Odessa in May of 1924.
My grandfather had two brothers, Lazar and Wolf Ortenberg, and a sister, Leia. My grandfather's family was very musical. Lazar was an amateur musician, and played the violin very well. He was a friend of the great Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov, whom he had met in St. Petersburg, and with whom he corresponded by letter. Lazar had a daughter, Sarrah, who married a famous Soviet commander and hero of the Civil War, a Jew by the name of Iona Yakir. Yakir was arrested on June 11, 1937. Yakir, Sarrah, their 14-year-old son Pyotr (nicknamed Petia), and Sarrah's father, lived in Kirov Street in Kiev. On the day Yakir was arrested, the authorities conducted a horrible search of their apartment. They broke the walls, furniture and floors looking for weapons and documents with which to implicate Iona as having contacts with foreign intelligence agencies, a false accusation. Yakir's son, Petia, showed them a toy gun that Iona had once brought him from Berlin when he returned from a business trip there. The entire family were arrested and taken to Astrakhan. Lazar died on the way. Sarrah was sentenced to 10 years in prison camps, and later, ten more years. Fourteen-year-old Petia was also arrested, but released in Sverdlovsk after 5 years. All the clothing he possessed was his underwear and a tyubeteika cap in which he kept his discharge papers. Luckily, on that very same day, he met some acquaintances who were in Sverdlovsk during the evacuation. They gave him some clothing, and in the evening they all went to the Musical Comedy Theater. Unfortunately, the first man Petia saw in the theater was the warden of the prison Petia had just left. Petia was immediately rearrested. This time he was charged with trying to cross the border into Iran. Petia demanded to be escorted to Beria. His request was satisfied, but when Beria began to revile Petia's father, Iona Yakir, Petia lost his temper and threw an inkpot at Beria. Petia asked to be sent to the front, but was refused. As we found out later, Stalin had decided to send Petia to the saboteurs' school. He was sent to the German rear twice, and completed his tasks successfully. Before sending him there for the third time, the authorities said to him that he would either die or come back a Hero of the Soviet Union. He fulfilled his task and returned. Afterwards, he was sent to penal exile at a gold mine. Petia was rehabilitated and returned from exile around 1955. He visited us in Kiev. I asked him once: "What would you do to Stalin if you got him?" And he replied, "Nothing. I would send him to where I was, and I would be his jailer until the end of his days." Sarrah returned from prison camp around the same time. She received a small two-room apartment in Moscow, and lived there until her death in 1977.
I have no information concerning Wolf Ortenberg, my grandfather's second brother. I believe he died long before the Revolution. His wife Leya, who resumed her maiden name Monastyrskaya after her husband's death, died in Odessa after the evacuation. She had four children. One of them, Pyotr Monastyrskiy, lives in the town of Kuibyshev, now known as Samara. He is a producer and is a People's Artist of the Soviet Union.
My grandfather Iosif Ortenberg, born in 1860, was also very fond of music. I don't know how he met my grandmother, but they married in Kishinev in 1880. Around 1905, their family moved to Odessa. My grandfather was a teacher. His students took classes at his home. My grandfather provided all his children with a good education. His daughters finished grammar school and his sons received further education. My grandfather was a man of advanced ideas for his time. He gave all his children a very good modern upbringing. Their family wasn't religious. Like her husband, my grandmother, Dora (maiden name - Korduner), was a woman of the world. She even smoked long, thin cigarettes. However, my mother told me that my grandmother never smoked on Saturdays. This was probably her tribute to the Jewish traditions. My grandfather rarely visited the synagogue, but he used to say that such visits helped him to keep the family together. Although the family wasn't religious, they celebrated the main Jewish holidays - Pesach, Purim and Hanukkah. The children were not at all religious. There were seven children in all, just as in my father's family. My grandmother Dora gave birth to a baby every two or two and a half years. Their large family rented a big apartment in the center of the city. In about 1905, Odessa was swept with a surge of pogroms. The janitor of the building where the family lived did not allow the thugs to enter their apartment, and the family stayed holed up there for several days. This janitor was a Ukrainian. He brought the family everything they needed. He adored my grandfather. After the Revolution, my grandfather began to work as Director of the Kindergarten at the House of Doctors. My cousins and I attended this same kindergarten. My grandfather worked there up until his last days. He died from a heart attack in 1934.
The oldest among the children was Abram, born around 1884. Abram finished high school in Kiev, and then was sent by my grandfather to the Netherlands to continue his studies. In 1914 Abram defended his thesis in economics there, and received a job offer. But then WWI began, My grandmother requested that all her children be at home. At that time, children obeyed their parents unconditionally, and so Abram returned to Odessa. In the early 1920s he worked on the Soviet farm there (he was a secretary of science), and introduced my father to his family. Abram married. He has two children, Naum and Larissa. Naum suffered much during the Stalinist years. During the war he was in the army, stationed in Iran as a topographer. After the war, he went to Moscow and submitted his application to the Kuibyshev Military Engineering Academy. There was a question in this application form about relatives abroad that Abram answered as "my father's brother is in Rumania," but nobody knew where Abram's younger brother was.
There also was a question in this form about any family members who had been repressed. Abram wrote that his aunt and her husband Yakir had been. As a result of these honest answers, Abram was summoned to the political department where he was advised to tear up the form he had submitted, and to mention nothing of the above in the new form that he was obliged to complete. In this way, he was able to enroll in the Academy. Abram was a very successful student. But when the period of struggle against the cosmopolitans began in 1949, Abram was again called to the political department and ordered to leave Moscow on 48 hours notice. He spent many years working in the Kalmyk steppes as a topographer. He came to Sterlitamak for three weeks every year to formulate the results of his surveys. Abram died in 1953, before his son Naum returned from exile. Later, Naum was allowed to move to Lithuania where he defended his thesis on land surveying. In the mid-1970s, Naum moved to Moscow, and in 1987 he emigrated to the USA with his family. He lives in San Francisco, and his sister Larissa lives there too.
The next son in the Ortenberg family was Grigoriy ("Grisha"), born in 1886. Grigoriy married a wealthy Jewish girl named Maria. It was a love match. In 1922, at the end of the Civil War, Uncle Grisha and his wife, along with their son Emil and Maria's four sisters, left for Bucharest via Constantinople on the last boat. Grisha took all the family's jewels and diamonds with him. In Bucharest, the girls opened a café that went broke, and the family's finances suffered. Grisha got a job as an economist at a big textile factory. His son Emil managed to graduate from a French college. During the war, the owner of the factory where Grisha worked helped Emil to avoid arrest. Emil and his father were lucky to remain safely in Bucharest until the Soviet Army liberated the country from the fascists. The owner of the factory escaped to France, leaving all his business to Grisha. When the first Soviet Consul arrived in Bucharest, Grisha gave him the key to the textile factory. Once more, the family could hardly make ends meet. In 1957, Uncle Grisha came to Odessa. We collected money for his return ticket. He died in Bucharest around 1970. After his death, Emil went to live with his mother's brother in Brussels. Emil was married to the sister of the Soviet Jewish writer Isaak Babel, who had emigrated to Brussels during the Revolution. Babel owned a big pharmaceutical company that he wished to bequeath to Emil, but Emil told him that Ortenbergs never dealt with commerce, and that it would turn to no good, anyway. From Brussels, Emil moved to Paris, where he now lives.
The next Ortenberg in the family was my mother's sister, Polina. Polina married Alexandr Kangun, a revolutionarys who came from a large Jewish family. Until recently, there was a Kangun Street in Odessa. It was named after Kangun's brothers, Monia and Lyova, who perished in Odessa during the Civil War. Polina and Alexandr adopted a girl. She was half-Greek and half-Jewish. Her name was Eraclia. During WWII Polina was evacuated. She died in Odessa in 1968.
After Polina, came Akiva. Sometime during the Soviet era, he changed his name to Nikolay. Nikolay was very tall. He served in the grenadier regiment in the tsarist army in Moscow. The members of this grenadier regiment appeared at the Bolshoi Opera as supernumeraries in the crowd scenes of operas such as "Life for the Tsar," and "Boris Godunov," and Nikolai had the opportunity to stand on the stage beside the great bass, Chaliapin. During the Soviet years, Nikolay was Chief Engineer of the port of Odessa.
The next child after Nikolay was Arnold. During the Soviet years, he was Chief Engineer of Odessa's canned food factory.
The youngest in the family was Iliozar. He was born after my mother. Iliozar was exceptionally good at music. My mother took him to Pyotr Solomonovich Stoliarskiy, a wonderful violin teacher. This man was semi-literate and spoke poor Russian, because, being Jewish, his mother tongue was Yiddish, but he was a God-gifted teacher. He was the first teacher of the renowned violinists David Oistrach, Lisa Gilels, Misha Fichtengolts, and many, many others. Iliozar studied at the Odessa Conservatory, and worked at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. He requested permission from Lunacharskiy to continue his education in Berlin, and moved toBerlin for his post-graduate studies. His teacher in Berlin was Professor Gesse. Later this teacher became a member of the Nazi party. In Germany, Iliozar changed his name to Elgar. In 1928 my grandfather and grandmother obtained a visa to visit Iliozar in Germany, but on the eve of their departure, my grandmother suffered a stroke, and died on February 28, 1928. My grandfather went to Germany in 1929 with my mother's older sister, Polina. Later, in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, a German newspaper published an article by Dr. Goebbels asking "for how long shall the blue- eyed Jew from Odessa who has the nickname Elgar charm the Third Reich with his tunes?" It was possible to publish one's denial in the newspapers at that time. Iliozar (Elgar) published a short denial saying that he had never concealed his origin or his Jewish identity, and that he was born and would die a Jew. By that time Iliozar had married Tamara Kogan, a Jewish girl, in Berlin. Her father was a companion of Lenin's who emigrated to France when Lenin died in 1924. After Iliozar and Tamara witnessed the anti- Semitic riot known as "Crystal Night," they ran away to Tamara's relatives in Paris. In Paris my uncle organized a string quartet consisting of four Russian Jews, all four of whom were mobilized into the French army even before the Nazis arrived. My Uncle Iliozar went on a tour to the USA with his string quartet. Later, he received a Legion of Honor Order from Errieau, France's Minister of Culture, for the propagation of French art in America. It never occurred to anybody that French art was popularized by four Jews from Russia. However, by then they had become French citizens. In 1939 Hitler attacked France. My uncle said that they all had to leave, but he wanted to the rest of the family, his wife's sister, Tamara, and her husband Leon to be able to leave as well. This caused some delay with the departure. When Hitler was almost in Paris my uncle closed the windows of the apartment and turned on the gas. He didn't want the Germans to catch him alive. Tamara managed to open the windows before it was too late, and they all fled to the south of France, almost penniless. In Marsailles they boarded a ship going to America. They arrived in America with one dollar in their pocket. My Uncle Iliozar was soon offered a job on American radio. He worked there for a long time, and subsequently became second violinist in the "Budapest Quartet," a group whose reputation as the best quartet in the world was undisputed. The first violinist and founder of the quartet was a Hungarian.
Before 1937, Abram corresponded with his brothers Grigoriy and Iliozar who both lived abroad. They were forced to terminate their correspondence due to repression, arrests and the "iron curtain." Around 1948-50, we heard by chance that Aron was still alive. One of Aunt Polia's neighbors brought her a copy of a magazine that had a picture of Iliozar with his Budapest quartet. However, we were only able to meet in 1969, when my Uncle Iliozar, who had changed his name to Edgar in America, visited the Soviet Union. In 1968 he sent a card to Aunt Polia telling her that he was coming to the Soviet Union with his wife. Polia, then 80 years old, ran to inform her relatives about his arrival. On the way, she was involved in a bicycle accident and died. I didn't tell my mother and Uncle Iliozar about Aunt Polia's death right away, but I had to inform Uncle Iliozar before his arrival. I shall never forget Uncle Iliozar's meeting with my mother in 1969. Uncle Iliozar liked me a lot. He didn't have children of his own. He visited Kiev many times afterward, and I went to visit him in America. After he stopped playing concerts, he became a professor at a College of Music in Philadelphia and gave Master Classes in Europe and around the USA. Iliozar died in 1996 at the age of 96, of sound mind. On his 95th birthday the year before, the mayor of Philadelphia came to greet him, and declared him a Citizen of Honor of Philadelphia, saying that he enriched this town and the entire United States with his music.
My mother was born in Kishinev in 1898. She studied at an Odessa grammar school. In 1922 she met my father and married him on June 22, 1923. They had a civil registration ceremony. Although my father grew up in the family of a rabbi, he wasn't religious, and didn't observe any Jewish traditions. He knew Yiddish, but he and my mother spoke only Russian at home. They only used words Yiddish words to emphasize or give special coloring to what they wanted to say, but I didn't understand that language. I was born in Odessa in May of 1924.
Location
Ukraine
Interview
Larissa Khusid
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