Tag #155144 - Interview #103703 (Lubov Rozenfeld Biography)

At home my mother and grandmother spoke Russian to my brother and me, but grandmother and mother spoke Yiddish to one another. I understood Yiddish a little, but I knew curse words particularly well. We didn’t observe Jewish traditions, celebrate Jewish holidays or follow kashrut in our family. My mother was an atheist and had a responsible job, and religion was persecuted [25]. My grandmother remembered the dates of all Jewish holidays. She baked triangle pies with poppy seeds till she managed. She tried to tell my brother and me about Jewish holidays, but we were pioneers and Komsomol members [26] and took little notice of her. On Chanukkah my grandmother gave us some small change saying: ‘Chanukkah gelt’. She didn’t eat pork, but we could fry something on pork fat lying to her that it was not pork. My mother’s relatives didn’t observe Jewish traditions, though they didn’t quite eat pork.