Tag #141319 - Interview #94042 (Isabella Karanchuk)

I remember our neighbors. Across the corridor from us there was the Levin family: Luba, her husband and their boy or girl, I can’t remember. Our next-door neighbors were the Chernichenko family, a husband and wife, they had no children. They were Ukrainian. I had a friend: Yulia Chernichenko, who lived in the apartment with her parents. Three families of four in the apartment were Jewish. We got along well with our neighbors. I don’t remember any arguments or conflicts, but we were not friends either.
My mother was a housewife and sometimes on Friday we visited my aunt Olga and grandmother Cherna. My grandmother put a nice old silver dinner set on the table and silver wine cups. My grandmother spoke Yiddish to my mother, though she picked Russian living in Kiev. My grandmother recited a prayer, lit candles and we sat down to dinner. Nobody mentioned to me that this was celebration of Sabbath. We never celebrated Jewish holidays at home – my father was a communist and had an official position. I liked Soviet holidays, when our relatives or my father’s colleagues got together in our room. They usually got together after a parade, sang Soviet songs and danced to the record player. Some of my parents’ friends were Jews. My mother made Jewish food on bigger holidays: gefilte fish, though this wasn’t even a tribute to tradition, just delicious food.