Tag #152359 - Interview #78059 (Yakov Honiksman)

My mother was a very beautiful woman. She was born in 1894. Her father gave his children good elementary education. My mother could read and write in Yiddish, knew Hebrew and could understand and speak Polish. She said that they had a teacher from cheder and then they had another teacher that taught them Polish, German and arithmetic. She married a Jewish man from Odessa in 1914. They had a traditional Jewish wedding with a chuppah and rabbi in Lublin. In 1914, when World War I began, my mother's husband was recruited into the army. I guess he didn't have secondary education. My mother heard later that he had married in Odessa. For a Jewish woman that had recently got married this was a terrible thing to hear. My mother felt hurt. However, she was a strong woman. She obtained a permit from the Austrian authorities to cross the Russian border, go to Odessa and demand a divorce from that moron. She returned to Lublin with a certificate of divorce, but she couldn't expect to find a good match. She worked as a seamstress in Lublin for several years and was glad to get a chance to marry my father, a cabinetmaker that had no education and had a baby. I loved my parents and they loved me even more. My parents had a traditional Jewish wedding with a chuppah and a rabbi in 1920.