Dveira Frumkina with her daughters and granddaughters

This snapshot was taken in Bryansk in 1920 - a few years after my grandmother moved from the city of Pogar.

In the center sits my grandmother Dveira Chaimovna Frumkina; in the bottom row from left to right sitting: her granddaughters Chasya and Zhenya with her son; in the top row from left to right standing: Dveira Chaimovna’s daughters - Pesya, Chasya and Zhenya.

My paternal grandfather’s second wife, my grandmother Dveira Chaimovna was 17 years younger than Grandfather Elimelekh and, being a housewife, brought up nine children: eight of her own and her stepdaughter Hana.

For the most part of their life they lived in Pogar, but after the revolution in October 1917 they moved to Bryansk and until 1929 rented a separate apartment.

At the beginning of the 1930s Elimelekh had a serious leg injury, but refused to be treated in hospital for religious reasons. He died of gangrene in 1933.

I remember Grandma much better than Granddad. She always brought us some 'gribenets' - goose cracklings - and treated me. In her last years she lived with some of her elder children in Bryansk and died in 1935.

I was six years old then. I remember that I wasn't permitted to fully participate in the funeral ceremony, but I well remember the special stretcher, on which Grandmother was lying wrapped in a shroud. She was certainly buried in accordance with religious customs.

Father's sister Pesya was always single and was involved in trade in Bryansk. As far as I remember she lived together with her sister Genya and that sister's husband Samuil Kats. Another sister, Chasya, lived in Moscow for a long time before the war and was the secretary to Lazar Kaganovich.

There she married Abram Iosifovich Khazanov, who was killed at the front. Their son Mark Khazanov lives in Bryansk now with his sons and grandchildren.

Father's sister Fruma-Riva died in the course of a pogrom soon after the revolution, but her husband Mark Getmansky managed to escape and rescued their two daughters, Zhenya and Chasya.

Zhenya later married a Russian boy, and they had a son. But in the 1970s she died soon after the death of her son. Chasya Markovna lives in Bryansk with her children and grandsons.