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Our neighbors were a peculiar bunch of people. In one way or another about two thirds of them were involved in the activities of the burial brotherhood; they either worked at the horse stables or maintained catafalques. There was a casket maker and a marble worker who carved inscriptions on marble stones. They were in Yiddish. Sometimes they were epitaphs: 'an honest and God fearing Jew died', etc. Other tenants in our house were bindyuzhniki that never drank vodka with employees of the burial brotherhood. Bindyuzhniki said that those earned their bread from other people's sorrow. There was a small prayer house near our house and one block away from the house there was a small synagogue. In the early 1930s they were destroyed during an anti-religious campaign of the Soviet power [during the so-called struggle against religion] [12].
We had a small apartment with three rooms. From the 1870s there was running water in many buildings in Odessa, but there were no bathrooms. Only richer families had bathrooms, but we were poor. Every Friday or Saturday we went to the sauna. There were many saunas in the town. We had old furniture in our apartment. My maternal grandfather lived with us and, besides, my mother supported my paternal grandmother who was living alone. When my mother was busy, she sent me to stay with my paternal grandmother. My mother had few clothes - a couple of long jackets and a dress - and still she kept herself very clean. When she could afford it she hired a teacher to teach me French and German. It happened periodically and I had classes for a few months in a row. My mother didn't have time or money to cook something special and we usually had borsch or cereals. She was convinced that a human being was an omnivorous animal and had to eat everything. My grandmother cooked traditional Jewish food every now and then.
My parents were atheists. My mother used to tell me, 'While a human being breathes, it is a person, but when it dies it becomes an element of anatomical dissection. Doesn't matter whether it's buried in accordance with any traditions or not. Worms eat everybody in the same way'. Religion, therefore, wasn't a matter of any significance to her. My mother and father's families spoke Russian. Only older generations, like my grandparents, spoke Yiddish. My mother believed Yiddish to be a German dialect. I remember a little anecdote from the time when a Jewish Industrial College was formed on the basis of the Labor vocational school in Odessa. Our neighbor Shora translated the work Resistance of Materials and other papers into Yiddish. My mother asked him once where he got Yiddish words from. She said, 'Even Sholem Aleichem [13] doesn't have these terms in his books'. [Editor's note: Victor's mother spoke about Yiddish, the language Sholem Aleichem wrote in.] And he replied, 'Well, there are many words in German'.
We had a small apartment with three rooms. From the 1870s there was running water in many buildings in Odessa, but there were no bathrooms. Only richer families had bathrooms, but we were poor. Every Friday or Saturday we went to the sauna. There were many saunas in the town. We had old furniture in our apartment. My maternal grandfather lived with us and, besides, my mother supported my paternal grandmother who was living alone. When my mother was busy, she sent me to stay with my paternal grandmother. My mother had few clothes - a couple of long jackets and a dress - and still she kept herself very clean. When she could afford it she hired a teacher to teach me French and German. It happened periodically and I had classes for a few months in a row. My mother didn't have time or money to cook something special and we usually had borsch or cereals. She was convinced that a human being was an omnivorous animal and had to eat everything. My grandmother cooked traditional Jewish food every now and then.
My parents were atheists. My mother used to tell me, 'While a human being breathes, it is a person, but when it dies it becomes an element of anatomical dissection. Doesn't matter whether it's buried in accordance with any traditions or not. Worms eat everybody in the same way'. Religion, therefore, wasn't a matter of any significance to her. My mother and father's families spoke Russian. Only older generations, like my grandparents, spoke Yiddish. My mother believed Yiddish to be a German dialect. I remember a little anecdote from the time when a Jewish Industrial College was formed on the basis of the Labor vocational school in Odessa. Our neighbor Shora translated the work Resistance of Materials and other papers into Yiddish. My mother asked him once where he got Yiddish words from. She said, 'Even Sholem Aleichem [13] doesn't have these terms in his books'. [Editor's note: Victor's mother spoke about Yiddish, the language Sholem Aleichem wrote in.] And he replied, 'Well, there are many words in German'.
Location
Ukraine
Interview
Victor Feldman