I returned to Leningrad with Lilyana in 1961, to our communal apartment, where all our relatives lived. Upon arrival I got a job as a construction designer at the ‘Elektrik’ plant and in 1965 I was transferred to the VNIIESO Institute [institute of electrical welding equipment], where I continued to work until retirement. After that there was a short break in my working career, and later I worked for seven years as a teacher in a Jewish kindergarten in St. Petersburg, starting from 1995.
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Margarita Farka
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All my relatives were buried at the so-called Jewish section [19] at the Yuzhnoye [Southern] cemetery in Leningrad – though they were not religious people, as many Jews in Soviet times.
When I returned, the Repatriation Committee helped me to get in line for improvement of living conditions. Once I received a phone call about an apartment. Thus I got a separate one-room apartment with my daughter Lilyana.
Several years after my return home, there was still no connection with Albania and no hope for the restoration of diplomatic relations with it. I knew nothing about Ismail and had no chance to learn anything. So I applied to the court in Leningrad, stated my situation, and the court passed a resolution on my divorce. Thus I had a ‘one-sided divorce.
e first met in a group of friends. He was divorced and had no children from his previous marriage. Soon we got married and in 1974 our daughter Olga was born.
My aunt Feiga helped me once again. In the 1960s, a decree on the improvement of living conditions for women-front-line-soldiers, who did not found a family, was issued, and she got a separate apartment. As a result of a complicated exchange of apartments and my husband’s room, we received a separate three-room apartment on Vyazemsky Avenue, where I still live together with my husband and daughter Lilyana, after Aunt Feiga died in 1994.
Our generation is referred to as ‘the generation of the 1960s.’ We literally snatched the novel by Ilya Erenburg [20], ‘Thaw,’ which was published after Stalin’s death. The title of this novel was symbolic indeed, and it anticipated the ‘thaw’ of the political climate in the USSR at the end of the 1950s. Later we were very much carried away by the story by Alexander Solzhenitsyn [21], ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.’ We were very glad to see that poetry by Osip Mandelshtam [22], Nikolai Gumilev [23], Marina Tsvetaeva [24] and prose by Isaac Babel [25] and others came back from oblivion. [The interviewee enumerates ‘worshipped’ Russian men of letters of the 20th century, whose works developed the cultural wealth of the Soviet intelligentsia of the 1960s/1970s].
Many of our friends emigrated to Israel, but for our family it was difficult. First of all because my husband had a very interesting job, which he loved and which was an essential part of his life. He would not possibly have found such job in Israel because of his age, lack of language knowledge and so on.
Mikhail Gorbachev [26] coming to power and the beginning of perestroika [27] brought about vigorous development of Jewish cultural, social and religious life throughout the country and in our city in particular. Jewish schools, kindergartens, community and cultural centers were established.
Valentina Fidelman
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My parents basically led a secular life, traditions were only observed at Grandmother’s home. With my parents we used to celebrate the Soviet holidays.
Daddy was transferred to Leningrad in 1939. He was a railway man, and from the North-Ossetia Railway he was transferred to the October Railway [the second longest after the Moscow railway and the first railway line in Russia], just before the war with the Finns [1939-1940] [11]. We exchanged our apartment for a room in Leningrad in Razyezhaya Street. Later Daddy exchanged the room in Razyezhaya for an apartment in Nevsky Prospekt.
I became independent too early, and as my parents expected a boy, I played not as much with girls, as with boys, and Daddy encouraged that. We played right in the street, and they all obeyed me. We fought street against street. We had rich neighbors, and now I can’t believe that I could climb over roofs and steal apples from them and distribute them among poor kids. There were a lot of poor Ossetians, Russians, Jews, all sorts of nationalities. We had no concept of nationality; I didn’t know what I was. There was no anti-Semitism in the Caucasus, we were true internationalists, and there were both Armenians and Georgians in our courtyard.
I studied in an ordinary school in the Caucasus up to the fifth grade, and when in 1939 we moved to Leningrad, I went to the fifth grade in Leningrad. My favorite subjects were natural sciences and literature. I was not so fond of mathematics. I was a good pupil, getting good and excellent marks. I possessed a good voice, and the teacher of singing, Antonina Kharitonovna, a very intelligent woman, made me sing solo. She advised me to enter some children cultural school. I sang in a chorus until the outbreak of war [11].
We survived until 1942, in the hungriest times [12], thanks to my Uncle Kostya. His family was transferred to Leningrad from the pre-Baltic area. He would bring us loafs of bread and other food. We survived and were evacuated. There was a fear that Leningrad would be surrendered, so the order was issued to take away all the children. Mom didn’t want to stay without her kids, and said, ‘Only if I go with them.’ And we, together with Mom, were evacuated to Sverdlovsk region, near Pyshminsky highway, I remember it well. I even remember the street where we lived in a barrack. It was the end of June 1942 – I was 14 years old, Mother – 36.
My father worked since we moved to Leningrad in 1939, at the Kirov factory [one of the biggest machine building and metallurgy enterprises of the former USSR] as a ‘voyenpred’ [military representative], not really in his field of specialization. They were making tanks and other military equipment there. And before this equipment got to the front, it was to pass the military quality control. And when the war began, he left for the irregular army near Luga [town in Leningrad region, from 1941-1945 a place of active military operations] and fought there.
In Sverdlovsk [today Ekaterinburg] I finished the Medical Assistants School, I entered it in 1943, and graduated in 1945. And for Tsilya, Mom rented a room, and she lived independently and was a student of the Pedagogical Institute in Sverdlovsk.
We didn’t return from evacuation all at once. In Leningrad there was an official by the name of Popkov [chairman of the Leningrad City Council of People’s Deputies, subjected to repressions in 1952]. I wrote a letter to him: ‘I implore you, I want to restore my city. Send me a summons, please!’ [Summons – a document authorizing a person to enter the post-blockade Leningrad] And in 1945 I received the summons and arrived in Leningrad. In May I turned 18, and in September I arrived, and got a job as a medical assistant in the factory named after Plekhanov. After work we used to clean and restore the city all together.
There was no information from Daddy. When I arrived in 1945, I learned that he was wounded. He continued to work at the factory, and only later he worked as a medical assistant.
In 1946 all our family arrived from evacuation, that is, my sister, brother and Mom, and they also were summoned to Leningrad.
Uncle Kostya also had his family back, they, too, had been evacuated. They went through all the basic hardships of the war in Leningrad, but as there was the order to take away all children, they were evacuated. They were in Siberia, and all the family returned, and they continued to live in Leningrad.
So Aunt Asya and Aunt Maryasya were librarians, and Tasya worked as a booking office cashier at the Moscow railway station. There she got acquainted with her Russian husband. Her father ‘crossed her out of the list’ [disowned her] after she married a Russian.
Uncle Ruvim, my father’s brother, came to visit Grandmother Tamara in Vladikavkaz; he lived in Leningrad. My uncle received a military education, was at the front, and when he arrived on leave in Leningrad he was killed at the railway station. It was in 1942. A bomb exploded there. I think it was at the Moscow railway station, but I can’t say for sure. That’s how he died. He was a military, wore those strips, there were no shoulder straps then. He was a senior lieutenant.
All my relatives on the side of Grandmother Faina, my Leningrad grandmother, the wife of Grandfather Zorakh, died during the blockade and are buried in Piskarevsky cemetery.
Pyotr Mikhailovich Balakhovsky is the son of Grandmother Tamara’s brother. He is a war veteran, a very courageous and kind man. When we had hard times after my sister died, and we were suffering a lot, he tried his best to help. A very open-hearted person. He was at the front, and his family was here and then they were evacuated.
Uncle Fima’s [one of Grandfather Zaretsky’s sons] first wife, Lyuba, was a dentist. In 1941 she gave birth to a girl, and Mom wrote to her: ‘Lyubochka, please come, I’ll help you!’ And she went right when the war began in 1941. And she was executed in Babi Yar [14] together with her baby; they were buried alive. Such a horrible destiny.
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During WW2
See text in interview
Uncle Fima even went to see Stalin after that. He then worked at the Kirov factory, on Pyshminsky highway, where they were producing ‘Katyushas’ [the commonly accepted name for a very powerful rocket offensive system developed in the years of Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union]. He went to Moscow from Sverdlovsk [Kirov factory and other Soviet plants were evacuated to Central and Eastern Russia during the war], to see Stalin and told him, ‘I want to be at the front, to avenge my wife and child.’ Stalin answered, ‘No, you will work on Katyusha!’ And later, after he returned to Leningrad, he went to revive the collective farms [15].
After the war we lived at 74 Nevsky Avenue, on the fourth floor, opposite the ‘Titan’ cinema, our windows were facing it. [movie theater focusing on historical films, a part of the entertainment company ‘Тitan.’ The building was bought by merchant K. P. Palkin in 1871, rebuilt and extended, and accommodated a restaurant. In the same building from 1873 the printing house of A. I. Granshel was located, publishing, among others, ‘The Civilian’ magazine, edited by F. M. Dostoevsky] There I spent my student years. We all went for walks along the Nevsky Avenue.
I worked at a factory for about one year. There were very good people there, and one engineer said, ‘Valya, you are so gifted, you should go to university.’ I answered him, ‘It will be very difficult, because the war has just ended, it’s 1947, lots of young people are eager to enter university.’ I passed all entrance exams with excellent marks, however strange it may seem, and entered the Pediatric Institute, which I graduated from with specialization as a pediatrician. Because I followed in my father’s footsteps…
I personally don’t want to go, after so many Jews died in the war, I consider it a crime, and I keep telling so to all my relatives, my cousins [Valentin and Felix Zaretsky], who are in Germany. I maintain that it is a crime against our nation to live in Germany.
In 1947 I was visiting my grandmother [Tamara] in the Caucasus. Once, when I had just come from a walk, I saw a boy – a Greek boy – who I met on the train. He declared his love to me, and I said, ‘All right, let’s go to the Terek, and if you swim across the Terek in the evening, then I’ll believe that you are really in love with me.’ That’s what kind of girl I was. He swam across the Terek, I was very impressed, but when I came home to Grandmother’s house I stopped in the doorway. There was my mom sitting there in the company of a young man, very handsome, blue-eyed, blond, very attractive, with a high forehead. I was stuck there in the doorway and fell in love with him literally from the first glance.
We dated for one year. His mother wanted us to get married. And he was a student of the Aviation Institute, and came to the Caucasus to have a rest at his mom’s home. His mother, whose name was Bratislava, knew my grandmother very well. Bratislava was a dressmaker and sewed for them. And that was how we met. We had an ordinary secular wedding.
We dated for one year. His mother wanted us to get married. And he was a student of the Aviation Institute, and came to the Caucasus to have a rest at his mom’s home. His mother, whose name was Bratislava, knew my grandmother very well. Bratislava was a dressmaker and sewed for them. And that was how we met. We had an ordinary secular wedding.