Frieda Rudometova’s uncle Abram Ladinzon with his wife Fania Ladinzon and daughter Lisa

My uncle, my father's brother Abram Ladinzon and his wife Fania and daughter Lisa. This photo was taken in Kiev in the late 1910s. I liked uncle Abram and after the Great Patriotic War I asked grandmother Pesia to give me this photo.

My uncle Abram, Jewish Avraam, born in 1896, married the daughter of a rich merchant in Kiev Fane and lived in Kiev where he owned a restaurant before the revolution in 1917. After the revolution and NEP Abram got adjusted to the new regime and gave his property away to the people's power that appointed him director of the restaurant. Abram had a wife and two children: Lev and Lisa. They were very wealthy. In early 1920, when I was a little over six months, my parents, my grandmother and grandfather Ladinzons and my father's brothers left the house and all their belongings in Murafa to move for Kiev escaping from pogroms. Uncle Abram lived in Kiev. He was rich and bought a two-bedroom apartment in the center of Kiev in Shota Rustaveli Street for us, and a good big room in an old building in Krasnoarmeyskaya Street. Our family was very poor and if it hadn't been for my uncle Abram's support we wouldn't have survived the famine in the 1920s.

In 1932 there was an audit at uncle Abram’s work. This audit discovered some violations, and Abram's family left Kiev in a rush without telling anybody. Only a year later they wrote us from Leningrad. During the Great Patriotic War Abram, his wife and Lisa evacuated to Samarkand. Continuous dust storms aggravated his chronic lung disease. Abram died in 1943. Lev was recruited to the front in the first days of the war and perished. I had no information about Lisa for many years. Only a year ago I heard that she lives in the USA. I wrote her, but there is no reply.