But I have to say that Grandpa never had any religious faith, especially after World War II. He said he couldn’t understand the God, who killed his children in gas-chambers. ‘I don’t understand Yehova [one of the Hebrew names of God], – he said, – perhaps, I just cannot understand Him.’ I remember well his other words: ‘Darling, there is no God, but He watches everything.’ As for Granny, she wasn’t religious at all, and that could be seen from the fact that her first husband was a liberal.
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Displaying 17461 - 17490 of 50826 results
Galina Shmuilovna Levina
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My maternal grandparents were both buried at the Jewish cemetery. I had a service for them in a synagogue, according to Jewish laws.
I don’t know if my paternal grandparents were religious, however we celebrated Jewish holidays all together. I remember Pesach better than all the other holidays, perhaps, because celebrating it, they cooked the best and the most remarkable food. Of course, Grandpa Mark and Granny Chaya knew Yiddish; they usually spoke it to each other. My maternal grandparents did the same. Not to hide something, it was just easier for them to speak Yiddish. Anyway, all my grandparents spoke both – I mean Yiddish and Russian – languages and dressed in an absolutely secular manner.
My mother was of the same age as my father, they both were born in 1907. Mother spent her childhood and youth in Kiev. Of course, she had babysitters and tutors and servants and so on, everything usual for rich families. She studied at the gymnasium [high school], she took music lessons, she learned to sing and, maybe, she had a chance to finish one or two years of Conservatoire. In Leningrad she didn’t have any possibility to get university education, so she entered secretary courses and worked as a typist.
My mother got to know my father just after they came to Leningrad, straight at their home. The point was that in this communal apartment, where my grandparents settled, my paternal grandparents lived, too, they lived there together with their numerous children, including my father. My Dad, Moses Markman, was a very handsome man, huge, very tall, with wonderful, gorgeous hair and big eyes. He even had to order his personal shoes. Then there were very few such tall people, and at a small factory, called ‘Skorokhod’ [today this is one of the biggest shoe factories in the north-west of Russia], they made shoes for those, whose size was bigger than 42. And even though my mother was of a very modest appearance, she wasn’t nice or tall, she was much smaller than him and reached only his shoulder, still he liked her, and they got married. It happened in May 1933. I know nothing about their wedding; my parents never recalled it or talked about it.
All her life Mother worked as a secretary at the factory, nowadays called ‘Samson’; it’s not far from Kirovsky factory [biggest factory in Leningrad at the time]. Father worked at the factory, too, but he had some engineer’s position. Of course, he graduated from high school, but I don’t know if he got some more education, if he studied somewhere else. They earned good money, and as for money we didn’t have any troubles. We lived like regular cultured people of this time. Certainly, our family wasn’t a professor’s family; my parents were working intellectuals. Our house was a typical house of people, who had to leave their native places and move to another one; here they built something necessary for everyday family life. We had ancient furniture, but I doubt it was the furniture of my grandpa, which he took with him; I think we rented a furnished apartment from the very beginning. Also, we didn’t have a library at home, nevertheless both Mother and Father liked reading. Of course, we had some books, but not too many.
My parents weren’t religious people, not at all. Certainly, they celebrated some Jewish holidays together with their relatives, but they didn’t pray. Mother never cooked Jewish meals, and they wore secular dress only and didn’t speak Yiddish.
I never had tutors or babysitters. However, I had a German teacher, Bertha Samsonovna, she taught children both German and good manners. She kept a private kindergarten: we were seven or eight children in one group, and every day we went to one of our homes, including our apartment, too.
When I was a little girl, we went to a dacha [10] in Sestrorezk [small town, famous spa and dacha place not far from Leningrad], but I can’t recall any details. My maternal grandparents went to Kislovodsk [town in the south of Russia, famous for its spas] every year in the pre-war times. They didn’t take me together with them, because scientists considered that a child under the age of five or six shouldn’t change the climate. So they were going to take me with them in 1941. They thought I would start going to the music school the same year.
Just after World War II started, my Dad was mobilized to the army. He was in regular troops, served as an ordinary soldier somewhere, not far from Luga [small town, 180 kilometers south of Leningrad], maybe even in Nevskaya Dubrovka [small settlement, 120 kilometers from Leningrad]. There he disappeared without any explanations.
I was evacuated together with my kindergarten. There was such a mess! So the kindergarten went to Pestovo railway station [not far from Leningrad], and German troops arrived there, too. All our tutors ran away, leaving the children. I don’t know what was going on with other children, I heard that somebody gathered them back and put them on some train or echelon, and it was bombed all over. However, outwardly I looked typically Jewish – big dark eyes, dark, almost black hair – and local inhabitants started to hide me in their homes. They took me together with another boy, I don’t know if he was Jewish or not. I remember this entire situation quite dimly, I know that they transferred me from one house to another, and also that I had some plastic dolls and I was playing with them. Then Mother reached this station somehow and took me away together with this boy, before the blockade [of Leningrad] ever started. She went to Pestovo by horses and echelons, and we returned back with numerous stops and transfers. I can say only that I’m very thankful till today to all those people, who hid me, risking their lives, and there were no Jews among them.
When the blockade was partly lifted in 1942, we were evacuated, we crossed Ladoga [large lake in Leningrad region], and bullets fell very close, just nearby [Road of life [11]].
So far we were evacuated to Siberia, to Kemerovo [big town in South-Western Siberia] region.
So far we were evacuated to Siberia, to Kemerovo [big town in South-Western Siberia] region.
So we finally found a place, Grandfather organized the work on this forest logging area, and then the first thing he did, he bought a cow. Of course, my Granny couldn’t milk a cow, but Grandfather said ‘you should’ and she learned how to do that. This cow was called Sedanka. Mother drunk some milk, too, and step by step she felt much better, and she started to work too, she was employed somewhere in raikom [regional committee of the Communist Party], as usual she got a job as typist. In my opinion, this cow gave less milk than an ordinary goat. Then Grandfather went to where they cut the meat, and they agreed to exchange Sedanka for Manka, a cow of some better kind. Someone loaded the herds and directed her to us. This cow Manka gave us fifteen liters per day, I learned to make butter in a bottle, and we got sour cream, cottage cheese. To tell the truth, we started to live much better.
While we were evacuating to Kemerovo, my mother said, ‘You can take three things only.’ So I took ‘A Captain at Fifteen’ [adventure novel by French writer Jules Verne (1828-1905)], a doll and a bear. Together with this ‘Captain at Fifteen’ book I came to the first grade of a local village school. The teacher asked, ‘Did you read it?’ I answered, ‘Yes, I read it,’ and started going to this village school.
My paternal grandparents, on the contrary, didn’t go into evacuation. I don’t know why, probably, they were very weak by this time. They died of starvation, and the same happened to Nina, my father’s elder sister. Obviously, Mikhail, my mother’s brother, was an important engineer, that’s why he didn’t have to go to the army. So he stayed in Leningrad, he got some ration, but, perhaps, he gave it to his family. So he died during the blockade, and his wife died, too.
I started school at the age of eight and I studied in Siberia for two years only. In Efimovskaya they had only one school, and there I studied for two more years. However, studies didn’t attract me too much.
Once my grandparents discussed my school successes. They spoke Yiddish, using Russian words very seldom, from time to time, and of course they thought I didn’t understand them. But I understood everything very well; although I never spoke Yiddish before.
So I should return to the postwar times. Finally we sold our cow and moved to Leningrad in 1946. Our room in Leningrad was preserved, because we were the family of a military, killed at the front – at the end of the Great Patriotic War we got a message from the military authorities, where it said that my father had died, but it wasn’t a usual so-called ‘funeral paper,’ it was a regular letter, saying he died somewhere, and the place of his death was unknown. However, my grandparents couldn’t live in their room any more, for someone was registered there, too [13]. They had no place to go, and since they didn’t have a room, they had to rent a house in Ozerki. We continued to live in Leningrad, in our communal apartment, and I left for Ozerki on my vacations. In front of their house in Ozerki there was some campus, it is still there, and I always see it going somewhere in that direction. They lived in a wooden house, which doesn’t exist any more, and then the authorities gave them their room back.
In Leningrad I studied at school #193 [14], which they wanted to rename and give it the name of Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife [15], but they never did. The school was situated very close to our house, it was almost next door, and I didn’t even put on a coat to run from our entrance to the school hall. After school lessons together with my classmates and friends we ran back to mine, because we had a large, 28 square meter room, and it didn’t take any time to walk. My maternal grandparents encouraged these meetings. I communicated a lot with my schoolmates, I was friends with all our class, and we were quite friendly teenagers.
I don’t remember anything special about my teachers either. Perhaps, only the Russian language teacher, a wonderful woman, she had been arrested and exiled in 1937 [16]. She was always surprised, ‘You are reading a lot, why do you write with mistakes, why is your spelling no good?
I can’t say if I felt any anti-Semitism from my teachers’ side, anyway, they didn’t ever demonstrate such sentiments. Perhaps, they were anti-Semites, and it could be seen in their eyes? However I’m such a person, who doesn’t pay attention to some things, I’m able not to hear, if not needed, that is my grandfather’s influence, too. People wouldn’t tell me something unpleasant, because I could talk back, or it wouldn’t make a big impression on me, like on other, more sensitive human beings. Later, as an adult, I heard things like: ‘look, there’s a kike going,’ or ‘your friend is a kike’, or ‘so many kikes everywhere.’ But I never reacted to all this.
As a school girl, I wasn’t just a pioneer [19], I just loved it! Maybe, it’s because I’m a social animal. I liked meeting people and going to pioneers camps a lot. After all, it was something quite different, because I did nothing more on my vacations. And I must mention my school vacations were quite boring: I spent them in Leningrad and did all the same as on the other days. However, I’ve been a bad Komsomol [20] member; I joined it for I knew it was necessary to do so. That was the only reason. Still I never joined the Communist Party.
I didn’t cry when Stalin died. I understood more or less what was going on, perhaps, they discussed politics at home. Maybe, my parents talked about it, maybe my Grandpa. Anyway, I knew what I should talk about outside and what I shouldn’t. Thank God, none of my relatives was arrested or exiled, but all this performance in 1953 after Stalin’s death was real fun for me.
I ran around all the time to find a book, I knew exactly that I had to find Akhmatova [21], or Yesenin [22], and you had to read them ‘under the table,’ otherwise it was dangerous. I’ve heard about Kirov’s [23] plot and what was going on in 1937. I never felt any delight because of Stalin or Lenin, not at all. Probably it happened because they raised me as a sensitive, intellectual girl, without any idols. Also none of my relatives were Communists; none of them joined the [Communist] Party.
Naturally, I couldn’t even dream of university, I had to work. I needed to earn money as soon as possible, so I entered some Mechanics College of Instruments and Equipment. It was quite a hard time, but, still I ran around somehow, dated boys, went to theaters and museums, I’d be queuing for hours for tickets to the philharmonic.
I started to work at the steel-rolling factory, in the instrument department, where I worked my entire life. First I was an assistant to the master, and then I became an engineer-technologist, later I got a constructor position. I spent my entire life in the rolling shop; I didn’t want to leave for the research institute, even though they offered it to me hundreds of times. I thought the rolling shop was something alive. I had wonderful relations with everybody, although my colleagues were very simple people, they could curse with rude words and so on. Anyway, they were representatives of the real working class, not like today. After all, the instrumental rolling shop is always the elite.
I remember only one occasion, but they told me about it many years later. There was a lay-off, and in the dressing room one of the workers said, ‘Why did they discharge Ivanova, and leave Levina? She is Jewish, they’d better dismiss her!’ Then my other mates beat him. And later, many years later, somebody was talking to me and said, ‘Don’t you remember this guy; we even beat him because of you?’ I asked, ‘How come you beat him? Why?’ Then they told me this entire story. When I first came to this factory, there were quite many Jews, but later we were the only ones [because of the campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’ [25]]: me, because I was nothing, assistant to the master, and a stove-maker. So we, this stove-maker and I, crossing the courtyard, smiled at each other. They dismissed many people, even the head of the industry, and who cared about me?
In 1962 Granny died, and Grandpa was completely blind by then. So I stayed alone with a bed-ridden old man, of more than 90. The same year he died in my arms, too. It was summer, and according to Jewish traditions, I had to burry him in three days and I had to hurry, because the weather turned to be very hot. Somehow I bought 21 meters of fabric, and together with my relative we took my grandfather to the synagogue at the Jewish Preobrazhenskoe cemetery. There they said: ‘For the first time we observe two women, a girl and another one, accompanying a 91-year-old patriarch.’ Also they were very surprised that he’d been lying in bed for nine years, but there were no bedsores on his body. So they washed him, cut his cloth and buried him in the same place where my mother and Granny were buried earlier. Also there was a Kaddish, and everything necessary. Numerous relatives of my father came to the funeral; however none of my mother’s came, because almost all of them were dead by that time.
My husband, David Levin – I always called him simply David – was really a handsome man and a very easy-going person. Then you couldn’t marry quickly, we had to wait for two months, but he arranged it. He said he was going to have the so-called Komsomol wedding, that’s why we had to pronounce slogans for the Soviet power and so on. I was already 30, and he was five years younger, he was born in 1939.
Just after we got married, I said to David, ‘I’m a woman with a simple college diploma, that is no good, but still I get some respect at the factory. While a man with just a college education is nothing; that’s no good at all. So would you please, my dear, apply for university.’ So he entered the Engineering Energy Institute, he graduated from it after some years of external studies, and his specialization was called ‘specialist in energy.