Fira Rabinovich and Sulamyth Derbaremdiker

This is a picture of my wife Fira Rabinovich and my daughter Sulamyth Derbaremdiker. The photo was taken in Kiev in 1960. During my post-graduate course at Kiev Light Industry University, in 1947, I met my future wife. She was a student at the institute. Fira worked at a hospital at the front during the war. She was awarded the Order of the Great Patriotic War. After Fira and her mother returned to Kiev in 1944 they lived in the hospital for some time and then they received a room on Saksaganskogo Street - and that replaced their nice apartment in Pushkin Street that they had before the war. We got married in 1948. We didn't have a wedding party, only a civil registration ceremony. Fira was a very nice, talented, intelligent and reserved Jewish woman, exactly the woman that my parents would have wanted me to marry. Our daughter Sulamyth was born in 1950. She got her name from my wife's sister Sulamyth, who died of spotted fever when she was young. Our daughter finished school and worked as a masseur specialist for some time. But she hasn't worked for a long time, she is very ill and I don't want to talk about her disease. [The interviewee's daughter is mentally ill.] In 1962 I received a small three-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Kiev. It took my wife about two hours to get to work. Then she got a job at the institute of extra-solid materials, located in our neighborhood. She was successful at her new workplace and created many new materials and tools. She defended her thesis. We lived a good life. We had interesting jobs and many friends. We never celebrated Soviet holidays, but we got together at weekends and had parties. We celebrated birthdays and always tried to celebrate Jewish holidays, although my wife didn't know anything about traditions. But she learned to cook Jewish food and we fasted at Yom Kippur. However, we didn't go to the synagogue.