Frieda Stoyanovskaya's co-students

This is me with my co-students, graduates of Kiev Pedagogical Institute. The photograph was taken in Kiev in 1935. I was twenty when I got a job at a town school. I met my future husband then. It was at the home of Marusia Simanovich, my ex-co-student, where I was introduced to Semyon Goldfine who was almost 26. He was already a well-known journalist, had publications in the Soviet mass media and had a pseudonym. It was Semyon Moiseyevch Gordeyev. We got married in July 1931. I didn't have anywhere to live, as there were four of us living in one room with my brother. So, after the wedding I moved in with my husband. His mother and sister accepted me very well. They lived on the ground floor of a small house. There were no conveniences in that house. We lived there for several years in a little room, one of the two that the family occupied. Our son Victor was born in this little room. We lived there until 1938, when Semyon Gordeyev, my husband, became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers and we received our apartment in Lenin Street, in the so-called Writer's Building in Kiev. I worked as a history teacher in a lower secondary, and then a higher secondary school. I studied at the Kiev Pedagogical Institute from 1932-35. My husband had over 10 books published by that time. Our life improved a little. Our circle of friends became wider and more interesting. But this was after 1935.