Tabl Rubel with her friends

This is my mother Tabl Rubel (in center), dressed in a fur coat, with her friends. The picture was taken when she was still single, in Vad-Rashkov in the early 1920s.

My mother, Tabl Lerner, born in 1904, wasn’t the most beautiful, but she was the most intelligent out of all the children of Moishe and Sura. She was able to express reasonable thoughts and make wise decisions. She was the head of our family. Father followed my mother unconditionally. She was often the ‘judge’ in many moot questions addressed by friends, relatives, neighbors. Usually those were issues concerning reconciliation of some quarreling spouses, raising children, keeping a family budget, seeing a doctor.

Mother was an intellectual person, though she only had elementary education. She was very good at Russian as she studied it at school, and later on she was fond of Russian literature. She knew the works written by Pushkin, Lermontov. She was also attracted to Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. My mother was self-taught. She had an insatiable appetite for learning. When Bessarabia became Romanian territory, Mother learned Romanian rather quickly. Mother had many friends and admirers.