Sarrah Antipka with her siblings

This photo was taken in Orgeyev on 25th September 1917, from left to right are my grandparents’ children: Feiga, Rachil, Gershl, my mother Sarrah, Moishe and Hana.

Hana, the oldest of all children, born in the 1890s, was a very beautiful woman, but she had one problem: she had a glass eye. She failed to find a decent match and in 1933 she moved to Palestine, following the Zionist ideas of the construction of a Jewish state. She got lucky and married a widower by the name of Lis. 

The next in our family was Gershl. He moved to Palestine in the 1920s and from there he moved to the USA, because of the continuous troubles caused by the Arabs. He changed his name to Harry, got married and had two children. My mother was born between Gershl and Moishe, who came into this world in the 1900s. He was a very gifted person. After finishing a gymnasium with honors he went to Bucharest. Moishe was good at languages. He studied French and German at the gymnasium. 

Rachil, Mama’s sister, born in 1904, the smartest of all the girls, studied in a gymnasium. However, she never finished it for reasons that I’m not aware of. Rachil married Musia Averbuch, a Jewish man from Orgeyev. 

My mother’s youngest sister Feiga, born in 1910, followed Moishe to Bucharest looking for a job. Soon she married Marcello Iosifzon, a Jewish man. It’s a Romanian name, but I don’t know his Jewish name. He was a rabbi’s son. 

My mother was born in Orgeyev in the late 1890s. Like Rachil she finished several years in the gymnasium and then became an apprentice of the best dressmaker in town. Some time later she began to make clothes herself and became even better than her teacher. When she was young, my mother was fond of revolutionary ideas like many other young people in Bessarabia. She joined an underground Komsomol organization.