Beila Molchanskaya and Shlomo Molchanskiy with a group of friends

These are my parents, Beila Molchanskaya and Shlomo Molchanskiy, with a group of friends in the Sobornyi Park in Kishinev. This photo was taken in Kishinev in 1927, by a street photographer during their walk. My mother got a job as a cashier in a store. She was very sociable and had many friends. My grandmother leased one room to make ends meet. Once, a young provincial man came in. He wanted to rent a room. At first he didn't quite like the room with its ground floor, a trestle bed covered with a clean white sheet, and plain curtains on the window. He left, but returned some time later: something drew him back to this house. He was my father, Shlomo Molchanskiy. Shortly after he rented a room from Grandmother Hava, my parents fell in love with each other and got married in 1927. When I was born in 1928, my parents rented an apartment in the house across the street from where my grandmother lived on the corner of Tsyrelson Lane and Oktavian Gog Street. This house belonged to former Russian aristocrats: the Meche-Nikolaevichs. Maria Petrovna Meche-Nikolaevich liked our family, and I was her favorite. She had two good-for-nothing sons. Though I was only three years old, I remember how adults said that one was gay and the other one a card gambler. To cut a long story short, they brought their mother to bankruptcy. Fleshel, a Jewish man, bought this house and the annex in the yard. We lived there till I turned seven.