In the past 10 years much has changed in Ukraine. I knew there were changes when I saw a huge portrait of Sholom Aleichem in Proreznaya street. It was during our first President Kravchuk's administration. There was a jubilee for Sholom Aleichem. This would have been impossible in previous years. I think anti-Semitism is in the past already. There are splashes of it, but they mostly come from older people, not the young ones.
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Displaying 19711 - 19740 of 50826 results
Irina Lidskaya
There is Jewish life in Kiev. The Jewish community arranges concerts, plays and lectures. Hesed helps us a lot to survive physically. It is moving and sad to realize that Israel is taking care of us, although we haven’t worked a day for this country or given it anything. And the country where we lived our whole life and to which we gave all our energy couldn’t care less about us. At the Hesed I always read Jewish newspapers and magazines. I always look forward to getting the next issues. I’m glad I’ve lived until this time. I’m sorry my parents didn’t.
My father, Yakov Benjaminovich (later – Veniaminovich) Lidskiy came from an assimilated family that led a secular life. They lived in Mariupol.
My grandfather graduated from the law department of the University and was assistant to a well-known lawyer; he had his own civil right cases.
The family was quite well to do. My grandmother took care of the house. Daily servants came in to help her. Russian was spoken in the family, which is why my father didn’t know Yiddish. But my grandmother knew Yiddish.
My grandmother was a seamstress, and she made bed linen. But her health broke down, and she earned less and less money. They lived in a small wooden house, the house where Grandmother Hana’s grandparents had lived. My mother remembered that each year her mother told her how good it would be the following year when they would refurbish their dwelling. The following year would come, and it was all the same. They had two small rooms and a little kitchen, a corner separated from one of the rooms. There was a well in the yard, and the children had to bring water from it and fill up a big barrel in the kitchen. There was a stove that was used for both heating the house and cooking. The older children looked after the younger ones. The couldn't afford to hire a housemaid.
They were very poor and didn’t have enough food.
They were very poor and didn’t have enough food.
They only spoke Russian in the family. My grandmother thought that it would be easier for them to get adjusted, if they knew only the language of the country where they were living. Therefore, neither Mamma or her sisters or brother knew Yiddish.
My mother was eager to study, however. At the time there were charity funds that paid scholarships to the most talented children from poor families. My mother studied by herself and in 1909, when she was 11 yeas old, she passed all the exams to get into secondary school and got a scholarship. She did very well in her studies, and she also earned some money giving classes. She was paid very little, but it was enough to buy food for the family.
There were pogroms against the Jews in Artyomovsk before the Revolution, my Mamma told me. My mamma’s face was the most typically Jewish of all the children. During one terrible pogrom their neighbors, who were orthodox (Christians) hid Mamma and put an icon in the window. People who had icons in their windows sometimes avoided pogroms. But they all knew that if they found out that they were hiding somebody in the house, it put all the tenants in danger. The neighbors covered Mamma’s head with a shawl and told her to remember that she was not Dina but Dunia. Mamma managed to survive, but many Jews were killed. It wasn’t the only pogrom in Artymovsk, but I remember this story of my mother. There were pogroms in Mariupol, too, but my father’s family avoided them.
Mamma told me that in those years life hung on a thread. Besides pogroms, there was the Revolution and the civil war, when the town came under the changing control of one army after another: the white or the red, then the white again and the green. After the revolution there were many gangs. They killed Jews and also others. It was a terrible, cruel and difficult time.
My mother had to work after school. She had to take care of her younger sisters and brother. I know that between 1918 to 1920 she was a doctor’s assistant in the town of Bakhmut.
My parents met and fell in love when they were at the Kharkov Medical Institute. My mother enrolled in the Pediatric department of the Institute in 1921 and graduated in 1927. My father had already enrolled in the Institute in 1919, in the General Treatment Department. He graduated in 1925.
My father was hired as a doctor in the medical department at some factory. My mother was a teacher somewhere in the country that was quite distant from Kharkov.
o add to the picture of my parents’ life in Kharkov, I'll tell something about my mother’s brother and sisters. After finishing school, Daniil (Dania) moved in with his sister (my mother) in Kharkov. He studied at the Kharkov Industrial Institute. Upon graduation he worked as an engineer at a big Kharkov plant. In 1940 he became a chief engineer. When the war started, Daniil supervised the evacuation of the plant and its employees. He was supposed to leave the day after the evacuation was completed. But the Germans were already entering Kharkov, and his neighbors reported to the first of them that there was a "zhyd" in the town. My grandmother told us that he was brutally tormented to death. My mother and father said that Daniil was a very nice, kind and cheerful man. He had no family of his own.
In 1935 our family moved to Kiev. My parents were offered jobs as lecturers at the Kiev Medical Institute. My father got a job in the Military Medicine Department. In addition, my father lectured at the post-graduate training institute. He worked in the Medical Department his whole life. He was a colonel in the military medical service and worked in a hygiene and medical care organization. My mother lectured at the department of pediatrics.
In Kiev we lived in 15/17, Institutskaya street Apt. 4, until the beginning of the war. (Institutskaya street is in the prestigious part of Kiev, called Lipki. This neighborhood takes its name from the name of the Lipa tree - the lime tree. In the 1850s the mayor ordered lime trees planted around the Mariinskiy Palace. After the Revolution the main Soviet governmental bodies were located in the Lipki neighborhood. The street gets its name from the old Institute of Noble Ladies, which was located on this street, at the corner of Kreschatik street. After the Revolution the building of this Institute housed the Political Headquarters (GPU). Now this building is a cultural center and is called the October palace of culture. – Editor's note.) We lived in a separate two-room apartment. It was very comfortable, with central heating, running water, and there was a gas stove in the kitchen. Yura and I had our own room. Mamma thought that her children needed the biggest and brightest room in the house. We had some furniture and a piano -- a luxury at that time. We had a unique library of fiction, medical books and Russian classical literature. The books were used to prepare lectures, and they never got dusted. Of the Jewish authors I remember Sholom Aleichem. He was the favorite author in our family. We also had the Russian translation of Perets Markish's poems. We had a radio, and Yura had a bicycle.
My parents had an ironical attitude towards the Soviet holidays. And as for religious traditions, I don’t remember any rituals or special food, etc. It’s a shame that I’m just beginning to learn Jewish holidays and their history.
In 1936, however, fear came into the life of our family and to many others. It was a time of repression that affected many of my parents’ colleagues and friends. Black cars would drive up at night and take people away. Nobody knew who would be next. Those were sleepless nights. My father always had his things ready, just in case. But somehow he was spared this disaster.
My parents knew that Hitler came to power. I personally wasn’t concerned, but I remember a widespread feeling of alarm. Rumors about Hitler’s attitude towards Jews reached us from Polish refugees. But at that time there was some kind of mass hypnosis in the Soviet Union. Everyone believed that we were the strongest and the best and that Lenin and Stalin were the wisest and most caring leaders.
I remember June 22 (1941), the first day of the war. I remember everyone’s concern, panic, tears, yelling, and the noises all around. My father's school was evacuating to Sverdlovsk in August 1941, and our family left with them all. We left our apartment and everything in it. There was a joke in the family that the only thing Mamma took with her was my chamber pot. Our trip was long. The train was overcrowded, with people standing and sitting.
In Sverdlovsk we heard that my grandmother and grandfather (my father’s mother and her second husband – my Dad’s stepfather) were also on the way to Sverdlovsk. They didn’t want to stay in Moscow with my father’s brother Lev; they wanted to join us in Sverdlovsk. In our room in this barrack we had two beds made from planks, one right next to the other. My grandparents slept on one, and we all slept on the other.
My father became a Party member. He was convinced to do so, as it was better for his career as a teacher. But he was never an active communist. My mother never became a Party member.
In 1942 my brother decided to go to the front. He was still under draft age, but he kept writing letters to the Moscow military college until he was admitted there as a cadet. My parents worried about him, but they thought he was old enough to make his own decisions.
In evacuation we heard about the extermination of the Jews at Babiy Yar. Although it didn’t affect our family directly, my parents took it as their a personal tragedy.
In 1944 Kiev was liberated and we returned home. We returned with the medical school that was evacuated to Sverdlovsk. We were excited to be back home. Upon our arrival Dad went to the militia office to confirm his rights to the apartment. But the authorities told him that a General Zheltov liked our apartment and there was no way for us to get it back. He said that if my father was going to fight for it we would have no place to live in Kiev. Daddy explained this problem to my mother and she told him to take things easy and agree to whatever apartment they offered to him. We received an apartment in Arsenalnaya street. It was a two-room apartment. My grandfather and grandmother lived in one room and the four of us in another. My mother said that the older people needed some peace, so they were given a separate room.
My parents continued to work at the medical school and I went to the fifth grade at school #78. The building of the school was half-ruined, and it was soon closed down. Our class was transferred to school #51. I didn’t like the school. It was a girls' school. Its director, Anna Ivanova, didn’t really like people with Jewish names. She was a rude person – that’s what I remember about her; I remember her with repulsion. There were many Jewish pupils in this school, but there were more Ukrainian and Russian children.
When I was at this school I became a pioneer, but I have no memories of it. I almost had problems with Komsomol There were many things that I didn’t quite understand, but I, as I hesitated becoming a member. By the beginning of the tenth grade, all the other students had become Komsomol members. I was called to the director on a daily basis. They kept asking me over and over when I would join. My answer was always the same -- that I was not quite ready for it. We had long discussions, and they told me that it would be a problem for me to enter the Institute if I were not a Komsomol member. In the end I went to the district Komsomol Committee and obtained my Komsomol membership card.
The Soviet holidays were celebrated very pompously back then. Both at school and at the Institute, everybody went to parades with flags and flowers on May 1 and November 7. It mandatory for teachers and children to attend those festivities. I always found it obnoxious and boring.
Upon our return to Kiev we felt immediately how the attitude towards the Jews had changed. The only person in our family with distinct Jewish features was my mother, and wherever she went there she faced anti-Semitic incidents. On public transport and in the street, people called her "Jew" and shouted insults, sometimes saying that Jews were the enemy and had to be destroyed.
I finished school in 1953. I wanted go into a profession that had something to do with literature, but I was told that in Kiev it didn’t even make sense to try to enter the University. My parents’ acquaintances advised me to go to the Kharkov Library Institute. I passed my entrance exams, but I wasn’t admitted. This was the time of widespread anti-Semitism, the time of the "Doctors' Plot" and the struggle with "cosmopolitans." It didn’t affect our family, perhaps, because my parents weren’t practicing doctors. But I did hear somebody saying in a hospital “Don’t go to a Jewish doctor. You know how they murder people”.