Tag #152517 - Interview #103525 (Sarra Nikiforenko)

My mother Enta Platkova was born in Kamenka town near Smela [30 km] in 1865. Kamenka is a picturesque town on the bank of the Tiasmin River where the river forms a curve and flows through rocks making dams. The majority of the population was Jewish. Ukrainians lived in surrounding villages. They were farmers for the most part. Jews were storeowners, craftsmen and balagulas [coachmen]. There was a synagogue and cheder in Kamenka. There was no Jewish hospital there and I don’t know whether there was a Jewish community there. There was a big estate in Kamenka that occupied a big territory in the town and spread to a big park on the bank of the Tiasmin River. The owner of the estate was a Russian nobleman. My mother told me that the landlord’s family were nice people. They didn’t oppress Jews and allowed them to trespass their estate. If they hadn’t been allowed to cross the estate they would have had to walk quite a distance to detour the area. They also used services of joiners, shoemakers and tailors provided by Jews and paid well for work. Only when their relative that was a musician was on a visit they didn’t allow Jews to even approach their estate. People said he was a terrible anti-Semite. Long afterward I read in the memoirs about Tchaikovsky 3 by his contemporaries that the great composer Tchaikovsky, visited Kamenka .