Tag #155839 - Interview #94794 (Semyon Tilipman )

I was earning well and so did Tatiana and we were quite well off. In the early 1950s we bought our first TV set. We spent our summer vacations with Tatiana’s parents in Chirchik near Tashkent. We spent time with friends and went to the theater. Before the war Tatiana and I went to the Jewish theater. I couldn’t understand Yiddish that well and Tatiana translated for me. After the war we went to the Ukrainian and Russian theaters – in one of them performed in Ukrainian and in the other one in Russian. In summer theaters from Moscow came on tours and we attended their performances. The thing is, our children didn’t need us any more. I remember performance ‘And then there was silence’ [after the modern American writer Vina Delmar’s play] staged by the Mossoviet Theater with Ranevskaya and Pliatt [famous Soviet actors]. We preferred the same play staged by our Odessa theater. We thought that Pliatt was overdoing his acting. We also went to the Opera Theater, but not that often. We subscribed to Roman-gazeta [publication of fiction issued twice a month in Moscow], Rabotnitsa [Women-worker, a monthly social and political magazine issued in Moscow], Zdorovie [Health, a monthly scientific popular magazine issued by the Ministry of Health in Moscow]. We still keep articles from this magazine with health recommendations. We also subscribed to newspapers: Krasnaya Zviezda [Red star, daily military and political newspaper of the Ministry of defense, issued in Moscow], Pravda [Truth, the main paper of the Communist Party of the USSR]. We always read articles in newspapers, but we did understand that what they wrote was different from what things were in reality.