Rebecca Levina

Here you can see me, Rebecca Alpert, in 1945, just after World War II in Leningrad.
The photo was taken just before my marriage to David Levin.

I went to Leningrad in 1944 and I've not been to Bologoye since those times.
Actually, I've been there once, when the university echelon was leaving Saratov.
The train stopped in Bologoye and stood there for some time, but I didn't see the city.

In Leningrad first I lived at the university campus, and then at my aunt Rosa's.
Then I got married and we all lived in one room in the shared apartment:
my mother-in law, father-in-law, my husband and I.
And our daughter was born there. Later my husband got a room in Lomonosov.

My husband who is four months younger than me, was born in April 1924 in Vitebsk,
but in his childhood he moved to Leningrad together with his family, so he is 'pitersky' [someone,
who lives in Leningrad, St. Petersburg since 1991]. My husband is Jewish, his parents were Jews,
but they never observed Jewish traditions, never kept kosher, or observed Sabbath.
They spoke Russian in their family, even though his father knew Yiddish very well.
David studied at the special military navy school, at the age of 17-18,
and was one of the oldest members of the Communist Party in 1944.

We met in 1949 at a dancing evening, even though he didn't like to dance and went to such evenings only a couple of times.
We didn't have any special wedding, neither Jewish, nor Soviet. We didn't have money to afford it.
So we registered our relations and I moved in with him and his parents.
They lived in the very center of Leningrad, on Gogol Street.
So finally I married a Jew, even though I wanted to marry a Russian guy, because I knew how it felt to be a national minority.