This is me and my first husband Natan Raiskin. The picture was taken in 1958 during our summer vacation in Leningrad region. We went on holiday every year.
I married Natan, whom I met at my mother's cousins' house in 1949. I remember that I was supposed to go to the Theater of Musical Comedy on that day to watch the Princess of the Circus. My relatives invited me to show me new magazines with patterns, because they knew that I liked to sew. At that time Natan and his sister Tamara dropped in, so we all drank tea and had very interesting conversations, and I decided not to go to the theater. Later we all went outside, Tamara jumped into a passing street railway and shouted to Natan that he had to see me off. He courted me very beautifully from then one and gave me chocolates, but he was always late, which runs in the family.
Natan was born in 1916 in Voronezh, in the Black Earth region. He spent his childhood and youth in Voronezh and Kharkov. Natan's family moved to Leningrad in 1932, and he entered the Metallurgical Faculty of the Industrial Polytechnic Institute. After graduation Natan was drafted to the army and participated in the Great Patriotic War until Victory Day. His father was a worker at the Kirovsky Plant, and his mother was a medical official. Natan's family lived in a communal apartment in the center of Leningrad, where they occupied two rooms, a big one and a small dark one without windows.
In 1945, after demobilization, he started to work at the Bolshevik Plant and worked there until his death in 1980. Natan lived with us and we helped his family on weekends. They had stove heating, so he sawed firewood. Natan was a wonderful man and an excellent husband. He only had one drawback: He worked too much; that's why his life ended so early. We didn't have children, as we always lived with my brother, who was 18 years younger than me. Later his daughter Alexandra became my substitute child, and I consider Alexandra's daughter, two-year-old Yevgenia, my granddaughter.
