Fanya Maryanchik with her father Srul Maryanchik

This is me and my father Srul (Israil) Avrumovich Maryanchik in Boyarka (Father stayed there in a rest home).  I came to visit him and someone took a photo.

My father was born in 1889. My father had no education and my mother also had a home-education.  He served in Tsar’s Army starting from 1911. In 1916 he was sent to the war. But he did not stay long at the front: he began to lose his sight because of gassing, which the Germans started to use during World War I. He was brought to a hospital and soon, in spring 1917, he was sent home. He suffered from optic atrophy. In 1924 he was still able to see, read and write, but little by little he lost his sight completely. Father had twelve brothers and sisters. Rukhl, the younger stepsister (my grandfather’s first wife’s daughter) left for America before the revolution. The next stepsister, Inda, was ill and died in Kiev in 1920. I don’t know why. She had no children. After that her husband married another woman. Later they both perished. Father’s brother Falek Maryanchik [1893], a furniture upholsterer, perished at the front in 1942. Next brother Kiva [1895], was in evacuation with his family in Chkalovskaya region during World War II, retired after the war and died in Kiev in 1953. Grigory Maryanchik, my father’s next brother, emigrated to USA in 1966. Stepsister Etl Maryanchik, was run over by a tram in 1934. I don’t know the details of their life.

In the 1920-1930s both Mother and Father were handicraftsmen. Mother worked from home and Father joined a Cooperative Association of Blind People. He knocked up wooden cases and assembled switches. We lived in the center of the city – in Bessarabka, across the covered market. (The famous actor Mikhail Svetin also comes from this district. When I met him, I asked him: ‘Are you from Bessarabka?’ – ‘How did you know?’ I said: ‘I read about it in a book’).

First we lived in premises attached to the workshop with no facilities. In 1930 the upper floor of the building (which was a hotel) was reconstructed into communal apartments and we occupied one of the rooms. Our neighbors in Kiev were very different people:  Russians, Jews. We all got along very well. Father was respected most of all. He was a very witty and sociable person and always took part in public work – he was member of the mutual aid fund, when he worked in the Blind People Cooperative. In summer my parents rented summer houses in Boyarka and Svyatoshen.