Tag #151467 - Interview #101609 (Remma Kogan)

I was born in Kirovograd on 9 November 1925. We had a housemaid that looked after me. She lived with us for about three years.  I can vaguely remember her. She didn’t look young to me. She wasn’t a tidy woman. I remember once stepping into my mother’s galoshes and walking in the apartment when I slipped over an empty tin and injured my forehead. I still have a scar. In 1928 my father was sent to work in Odessa.  My parents bought a wardrobe and dinner table from the owner of the apartment we rented and moved them to Odessa. We had them for a long time. In Odessa we lived in a communal apartment [18] on the 3rd floor, in a house in Olgiyeskaya Street in the central part of Odessa. There was a bathroom, a toilet and coal stoked stoves. We made stocks of coal for winter. The other tenants of our apartment were Russian. They were the family of Znoiko:  a wife and husband and their grown up daughter. We got along very well with them. Vasili, the head of the family, was an ethnographer. He often went on tours. His daughter Olga was an artist and his wife Zinaida was a housewife. During the war our neighbor died and his wife died after the war. Their daughter moved to Leningrad where she worked as an artist at the china factory. A big Jewish family of the Bodners lived in the basement apartment in our house: there was a husband and wife and four children. There were three sisters: Friema, Rosa, Menia and brother Samuel. When my mother was to go to work and there was nobody to look after me my mother took me to the Bodners where I spent half a day. They were very poor. I remember that they gave me makukha [ground sunflower seed husk] to eat.  During the Great Patriotic War Friema married a Polish Jew in evacuation  and they moved to Poland. Friema lives in America now and her sisters Rosa and Menia live in Israel.  Rosa often calls me. On the first floor of our house there was another family that were my parents’ friends.  The father of the family whose last name was Sosyura was an obstetrician. They didn’t have children, but on New Year they arranged a party for their neighbors’ children. I remember these parties since we always received gifts on them.

In 1928 my father entered Communications College in Odessa.  He attended classes and mother took up any work to support the family. In 1932 after finishing the college my father got an offer to lecture at the Electric Engineering Department. I have dim memories about famine in 1933. I was 8 years old and my parents took every effort to protect me from it.  All I can remember is that my mother took her only pair of gold earrings to a Torgsin [19] store. 

On 30 March 1933 my brother Yuri was born in Odessa. I went to school in 1934 when I turned 9 years old. I missed the first grade at school since I had to look after my baby brother at home. I went to school #5 in Mechnikov Street and then my parents sent me to school #28 in Perekopskaya Pobeda Street. Both school were Russian. We had very well qualified teachers. Many of my classmates were Jewish children, but I don’t remember about teachers. My favorite teachers were as follows:  teacher of mathematic Georgi Khristoforovich Stoyanov and Ms. Kiriakiova, teacher of the Russian literature and language. She inspired me to read books by Pushkin, Lermontov [20], Chekhov, Kipling [English writer and Nobel laureate, author of The Jungle Book (1894) and Just So Stories (1902)]. I took piano lessons at the music school in the Scientists House. I had all excellent marks at school and was a pioneer. I didn’t join Komsomol since nobody offered me to become a Komsomol member. I had two friends at school and they were both Jews: Inna Faiman and Zoya Lyubianskaya.