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This is a photo of our son Roman Tomengauzer and his family. Left to right: Roman, his second wife Tatiana Tomengauzer and their daughter Lidia Tomengauzer. My son and his family live in Daugava, Latvia. The photo was taken in 2001 in Daugava, where my son and his family were spending a weekend on the lake.
Roman graduated from the Faculty of Economics at the Moscow University of Oil and Gas. Upon graduation in 1978, he returned to Chernovtsy and got a job at the machine building plant.
When my son returned home, quite a few Jewish girls were seeking his attention. I was hoping that my daughter-in-law would be like a daughter to me and a close person; I wanted my son to have a Jewish family with Jewish traditions. I wished that my daughter-in-law were a Jew, to be at least the same nationality as he. I couldn't understand then that my son didn't have the foundations that I had. What was most important, he didn't have respect towards the wishes of older people. I couldn't imagine that my son would get married without having his parents' consent. I grew up in a traditional Jewish family based on respect to one's parents. That was how we were trying to raise our son. His classmates even teased him because he never left home before his grandmother blessed him. He waited for his grandmother's blessing before going to take exams. So, I couldn't understand why he avoided meeting girls.
One day he told me that he had a woman and that she was having a baby. They didn't get married. She was 7 years older than my son and she was Ukrainian, to crown it all. Her name was Galina Grazhdan. This news was a shock for me. Their daughter Victoria was born in 1977. A year later, their son Julian was born. In the course of time my attitude towards this woman changed. Galina was an engineer and she turned out to be a very good mother. My son didn't live with them, but he paid allowances for the children.
When my son went to the Baltic Sea on a vacation, he met a Russian woman there, two years older than he. He fell in love with her. I met with her, and asked her to talk with her parents before she decided to marry a Jewish man with two children. Some time later, she called to tell me that her parents had given their consent. My husband and I went to Daugava where this girl, Tatiana Tushyna, lived. We met with her parents to make arrangements for the wedding. Roman stayed in Daugava with his wife. Their lovely daughter Lidia was born in 1990. My son used to bring his family on vacations to visit us every year. I also visited them there. Traveling became difficult after the fall of the Soviet Union. We need foreign passports and visas to travel there. Besides, I can't afford to travel that far any more. The trip is very expensive. We correspond and call each other every now and then.
