Barukh Vingelnikov

This is my great-granddad on my mother's side, Barukh Vingelnikov. The photo was taken in Irkutsk in the 1910s.

Granddad Barukh became a widower early and married again. I know little about his first wife, but his second wife, whose name I don't know either, was a difficult and selfish woman and mother used to purse her lips when talking about her.

Barukh's second wife gave birth to two daughters, Bertha and Liya and they were of the same age as Sonya, my mother's mother, and they were friends, too. Barukh's wives were very beautiful.

Otherwise great-granddad Barukh wouldn't have swallowed the bait [fallen in love] and married them. His two daughters were good-looking too, and each had been married twice.

Liya got married, her husband was a very good person, but then she met a doctor from a research expedition named Adolf, and he literally kidnapped her and took to Chara River with him, and they called their daughter, born in the 1930s, Chara. I don't know what happened to Adolf later, but I know that he was a doctor with some expedition and an enterprising and adventurous person.

Chara and I were coevals and very good friends, until she left for America in the 1980s. She died of cancer in Boston two weeks after she got there. She worked as a general practitioner all her life.

She used to say that she had dragged her second husband up from the 'bottom of life,' that is from a communal apartment. Her daughter Mila lives in Boston now and it is through her that I know about their family.