Tag #147670 - Interview #83494 (Alexander Mussel )

I met my wife to be, Anna Movshevna, at a railroad station in Sochi in 1953. I was on vacation in Sochi in the Caucasus. I wanted to send a parcel of fruit to my elder sister in Leningrad. I bumped into a woman at the station, my wife to be, and asked her to deliver my parcel. So this is how our acquaintance started. She left her address and we began to correspond. Later on we came to know each other closer. She turned out to be a Jewess. She really doesn’t look like one and I didn’t know at first that she was Jewish. Later I invited her to our military station, where I lived near the Kapustin Yar range. She stayed with me for some time, and when I came for a vacation to Leningrad we got married. We had Jewish meals at our wedding; however, we didn’t observe Jewish traditions at the wedding. Actually some of our elder relatives, who were present, knew Jewish traditions. We had no chuppah, we didn’t pray or invite a rabbi. Everything connected with religion was prohibited in the country since the Soviet regime had been established in 1917 [21].