Tag #155739 - Interview #103724 (Faina Saushkina Biography)

At leisure time my friends and I went to dancing parties and sang in a choir – we sang popular jewish and Soviet songs. Once the district Komsomol committee sent us to a frontier unit in Slavuta where I met my future husband. We conducted meetings dedicated to memorable dates, recited poems and sang. Once our neighbor Manya Vinokur that lived in another half of our house came to our house. She told me that a guy wanted to meet me. He saw me several times during our performances at the frontier unit, but dared not to approach me. At that time morals were very strict in smaller towns in all families, not in only in Jewsih. Young girls could only meet with young men with their mothers or older sisters chaperoning them. Any intimate relationships with young men were out of the question. It was normal when a husband’s mother checked bed sheets after the first night to make sure that is wife was a virgin.

Knowing strict morals of Jewish families this young man didn’t know how to approach me. I told my parents that a military from the frontier until wanted to be my friend and they invited him to our home. Manya brought this soldier to our house in the evening. He was a Russian guy with fair hair, blue eyes, handsome and strong. His name was Alexandr Savushkin. Alexandr was born in a poor family in a village near Voronezh, in the central part of Russia in 1912. His parents died of typhoid during the Civil War and Alexandr and his sisters grew up in a children’s home. He served in the army in Slavuta. Alexandr was a cook in a canteen for soldiers.