Before retiring in the middle of the 1980s I decided to make some money for our old age. I went to the construction of an oil pipeline in Tumen in 3000 km east from home. They paid very well for work. I lived in a tent. Living and climatic conditions there were very hard. My wife fell ill and in late 1987 I returned to Ternopol. Natalia had cancer. In late 1989 she died. I went back to the north after she was buried and worked there sometime longer. I cannot forget my wife. She was the only woman I loved in my life. Since then I’ve been alone.
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Semyon Ghendler
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In the early 1990s my sister, her husband and their children moved to Israel. Her husband died in Israel. My sister lives with her daughter in Haifa. I correspond with her.
My mother was alone for many years. In the middle of 1960s she married our distant relative Isaac Zhuravski. I was glad that my mother was not alone any longer. Living in Cheliabinsk I couldn’t support her. However, their marriage lasted less than a year: Isaac was pathologically greedy and my mother divorced him. She lived in Zhytomir until 1990. When I returned from the North she moved in with me here. She remained an atheist even at her old age. She didn’t observe Jewish traditions. She died in 1992. She was buried in the town cemetery and there were no rituals observed at her funeral.
My younger son Georgi entered Odessa artillery school after finishing secondary school. After finishing it he served in Poland. When out troops were leaving Eastern Europe in the 1990s he retired from the army.
I had a good life. I had many friends wherever I was. The huge Soviet Union was my home and I feel bad about the breakup [22] of the country. I still have friends in Cheliabinsk, Tumen and other towns. They often call me, even at night, due to the time difference. However, I feel sad about not being able to visit them like I used to when we might come all of a sudden without notification. We often went with families to Odessa, the Crimea or Caucasus. We cannot afford this now. In the past my monthly salary was enough to buy plane tickets and stay in any town of the USSR for a couple of weeks with my family and now I have to think twice even about commuting in the town. A ticket to the nearest town costs half of my pension, not to mention planes. All my savings that I earned so hard working in the north were gone when perestroika began. My sons support me and I try to support my daughter.
, Russia
The only positive thing that I see in perestroika is democracy for minorities, including Jews. I am a member of the Jewish community in Ternopol. Of course, I shall never become religious, but I like studying Yiddish, Jewish traditions and celebrating Jewish holidays in the community. The local Hesed provides assistance to pensioners.
I’ve been to Israel. I admired this country. It was built with love, but I understood that I would never be able to live there. It’s a different country for me with a different life style and hard climate. I couldn’t wait until my month’s long visit to my sister was over and I could return to Ternopol.
In 1850 Ovruch became the Hasidic [1] center. There was a Hasidic synagogue and a private Jewish school in Ovruch. In the early 20th century Ovruch became the center of Zionist activities. During the Civil War [2] the power in town switched 15 times and there were pogroms [3]. The most blood shedding pogrom was arranged by Petliura groups [4] in late 1918 – within 17 days they exterminated about one hundred Jews. Soviet authorities closed the synagogue during the period of struggle against religion [5] in the middle of the 1930s.
My grandfather was a strong and tall man with a big gray beard. He always wore a cap and never even sat down to a meal with no headpiece on. My grandfather was religious and prayed every morning with his tallit and tefillin on. On Saturday and Jewish holidays he went to the synagogue with grandmother Feiga.
Grandmother Feiga was born in the late 1960s. She was three years younger than my grandfather. She was a small and thin old woman. She wore a kerchief. She had no education whatsoever and was a quiet and taciturn woman. She was a housewife. They lived in a small house with three small rooms and a kitchen. There was a big Russian stove [7] in the kitchen. My grandmother cooked delicious food in it. She baked pies and challah bread for Sabbath. There was a small vegetable garden and a few fruit trees near the house. My grandmother Feiga never went to work. She did housekeeping and raised her children like all Jewish women at the time.
Before the Great Patriotic War [8] Froim, his wife and their sons Osia and Lyova lived in Ovruch. When the Great Patriotic War began their sons were recruited to the army and Froim and his wife evacuated.
Froim was raised religious like all Jewish boys, but he was an atheist and didn’t observe Jewish traditions. However, he respected his parents and always attended celebrations of Jewish holidays in my grandfather’s home.
My father also had two sisters, whose names I don’t remember. One of them lived in Ovruch. Her son was named Shloime like me. He perished during the Great Patriotic War. Her daughter Zinaida was a dentist. In the 1970s she moved to Israel with her family. I wasn’t in contact with her after the Great Patriotic War. As for the second sister, who lived in Korosten not far from Ovruch, I only saw her once in my life at a family gathering in my grandfather’s home before the great Patriotic War. During the war she was in evacuation and after the war she lived in Simferopol in the Crimea, 800 km from Kiev.
, Ukraine
My father Zachari Ghendler was born in Ovruch in 1904. He received traditional Jewish education: he finished cheder and four years of Jewish elementary school. He knew Yiddish well and he also knew the Torah, but during the Soviet regime he was an atheist. In 1917, during the revolution, my father joined the Red army like many Jewish young people escaping from pogroms and poverty in their towns hoping for a different life. My father served in cavalry. After the Civil War my father was a laborer at different jobs. In 1925, when he met my mother, he was a laborer at the leather factory: he handled skin leather.
Zhytomir is a regional town in Ukraine, 150 km from Kiev. In 1926 its population constituted a little over 100 thousand people and 39% of it was Jewish. Two thirds of all craftsmen in the town were Jewish. Zhytomir was one of historical centers of Hasidism. Before the revolution of 1917 there were few dozens synagogues and a rabbi seminary in the town. After the revolution religious activities gradually decayed and by the early 1930s there was one synagogue operating in the town].
My grandfather finished cheder and went to work. He became a high skilled cabinetmaker. Before the revolution he worked for his employer and after the revolution he went to work for the ‘Bogatyr’ furniture shop that became a furniture factory in the 1930s. My grandfather earned well. After the revolution he manufactured furniture on private orders.
My grandfather was very religious. In the 1930s, when I knew him, my grandfather wore a small well-groomed 3-4 days’ growth beard. He also wore a cap or a hat, but I never saw him wearing a kippah. My grandfather always prayed before going to work with his tallit and tefillin on. On Friday, Saturday and Jewish holidays he went to the synagogue. His employers respected him so much that they allowed him to not come to work on Saturday. Instead, he came to work on Sunday to do his portion of work. My grandfather’s portrait was on the board of honor of the factory [Editor’s note: every factory, plant, or any other state enterprise in the Soviet Union had a board of honor with portraits of the best workers of the factory. It was a great honor to have one’s portrait there].
Grandmother Esther was a housewife. She always dusted their tiny apartment. They lived in two rooms and had a kitchen, but when their children grew up and moved out they had a tenant in one room. I loved visiting my grandfather and grandmother and remember their room very well. They had a beautiful carved cupboard that grandfather made himself, a wardrobe and chairs with high carved backs. There were snow white napkins on the cupboard that my grandmother made and seven little elephants: a symbol of happiness at the time.
My grandparents had three children: my mother and two brothers, one older than my mother and one younger. My mother’s brothers finished cheder. They grew up to be atheists. In the 1930s they joined the Communist Party. Aron, the older brother, born in 1902, dealt in trade. He was married, but divorced his wife. From Zhytomir Aron moved to Fastov where he worked at the railway station of Grebyonki and later in Nezhin. During the great Patriotic War Aron was in evacuation somewhere in the Urals.
My mother’s younger brother Lazar was born in 1908. Lazar finished Kiev Engineering Construction College and worked as an engineer in Dnepropetrovsk, 350 km from Kiev. His wife was Russian. I don’t remember her name. Their daughter had a strange name of Saida. We called her Saya. During the great Patriotic War Lazar served in an engineering unit building bridges and fortifications for frontline forces.
My mother Yelizaveta Ghendler (nee Oks) was a withdrawn person. I know little about her life before marriage. She was born in Zhytomir in 1905. At home she was called Lyonia for some reason. Though her parents were religious they decided to give their daughter secular education. My mother finished a Russian grammar school in 1918. I don’t know whether my mother worked before the early 1920s, when she met my father. They met in 1925 and fell in love with one another. My father was a strong handsome man. My mother was young and fair-haired. They made a beautiful match, but they couldn’t get married right away. My grandparents Oks were against their marriage. They believed my mother could find a better match with education equal to her own, but my mother wouldn’t even consider another man. In 1926 my mother’s parents gave up and my parents got married. I don’t know any details about their wedding. All I know is that it was a traditional Jewish wedding. The young couple was so happy to have their parents’ consent that they didn’t argue about having a chuppah, and rabbi and a marriage contract, though by this time they had given up religion. They had a traditional wedding in Zhytomir where they invited relatives from Ovruch and Korosten and then my parents had a civil ceremony in a registry office.
I have some memories of my childhood. I remember visiting my maternal grandfather and grandmother at Chanukkah. Of course, I learned the name of the holiday later, but I remember delicious doughnuts that my grandmother made and I also received some money from them. My grandmother made delicious pastries and the biggest offence for her was when somebody told her that they had eaten more delicious doughnuts. My grandfather took me to the synagogue: a big two-storied building in the center of Zhytomir. When my grandmother went with us she went upstairs and my grandfather and I stayed downstairs. We often visited my father’s parents in Ovruch. I remember the first Pesach in my life that we celebrated in their house. My father’s relatives got together on this holiday and his sister came from Korosten. There was a table beautifully set for dinner. My grandfather was reclining on two cushions with his back to the door. I was to find a piece of matzah that he hid under a cushion. There was a lot of laughter and comments while I was looking for it. Then my grandfather conducted seder and I posed four questions to him about the nature of this holiday and my father helped me. I think I have such bright memories about these celebrations since they were unusual for me. We didn’t observe Jewish traditions in our family, though my mother or father never joined Komsomol [11] or the party, but they were atheists.
In the early 1930s we lived in Olevsk of Zhytomir region, 70 km from Zhytomir. My father was offered to work in a store and the family moved to this town. We lived with some relatives in a wooden house with a garret.
I have dim memories of famine in 1932-33 [12], when my father brought some packages from his work. This was dried bread that we dipped in water before eating them. I remember a constant feeling of hunger, but nobody died in our family, though there were dead people in the streets every morning and special trucks picked them.
My father proved to be good in trading business. Although he didn’t have any special education he was offered to become director of a fish store and in 1935 he got an offer to become director of a big food store in Zhytomir. We returned to Zhytomir.
That same year I went to a Russian school. My parents didn’t even discuss my going to a Jewish school. We spoke Russian in the family. My parents rarely switched to Yiddish when they didn’t want me to understand the subject of their discussions. My grandfather still took me to the synagogue on Saturday, but I lost interest in it. I ran away from him until my mother told him to stop taking me with him.
I preferred to spend time playing with my friends. There were Russian, Ukrainian and Polish children among my friends. Nationality didn’t matter. We spoke Russian and enjoyed spending time together. There were few Jewish families among our neighbors. They didn’t observe any Jewish traditions either.
We lived in a small apartment. There were two rooms and a small kitchen. I remember the furniture that my father bought: big nickel-plated beds and a wardrobe. The table was always covered with a fancy tablecloth and there were linen covers on the chairs and the sofa. My father had an average income sufficient to make a decent living. My mother didn’t work before the Great Patriotic War.
My friends and I played war and pirate games and football. We often went fishing to the Teterev River. There were picturesque spots in the area: I can still remember the smell of newly mown hay and meadow herbs. On weekends my parents and I went to the riverbank. My father went swimming and my mother was waiting on the bank looking at him. They enjoyed talking to one another and my sister and I joined our friends. Another boys’ hobby was keeping pigeons. My father made a pigeon house in the yard and we spent there all our spare time.
I had many friends of various nationalities at school. There was no such issue as nationality before the war. I studied well and was fond of mathematic and physics. I also liked geography. My pioneer errand was issuance of a wall newspaper where I was an editor. I visited my grandfather in Ovruch on my summer vacations. I also spent my vacations in a pioneer camp on the Teterev River. We celebrated Soviet holidays at school: there were pioneer marches on 1 May and 7 November [13], and on the international Day of young people on 1 September. We always went to parades on holidays. It was a lot of fun. We also celebrated Soviet holidays at home. My parents invited their friends. They danced to the wireless and sang Soviet songs.