Max and Tsiva Ginovker with their great-granddaughter

This is a picture of my brother Max Ginovker with his wife Tsiva Ginvoker, nee Goisman, and their great-granddaughter in their apartment in St. Petersburg. The photo was taken in the year 2000. The name of my third brother who was seven years my senior, was Mendel, but for as long as I can remember our family always called him Max. When he received his passport, Mendel officially became Max. After graduating from a Russian gymnasium and serving in the army as a field engineer, Max went to study in Genoa, Italy. He received the degree of a shipbuilding engineer and returned to Tallinn. A year later, he went to study again, this time to London, UK. Our parents, who hadn't had the opportunity to study well as children, realized the importance of good education and didn't spare money to provide for their children's studies. Max graduated from a university in the UK and came back home just before the war. He enjoyed studying; by the end of his life he had four university degrees. Max had a great talent for languages. He knew Russian, Estonian, Yiddish, Hebrew, English, German, and Italian well. From 1940 to 1947 he was deported to Kilmez, Kirov region. Afterwards Max went to Moscow and got married there. Tsiva, his wife, was 15 years younger than Max. She taught French. They had a son, Alexander. Max worked compiling a Russian-Italian dictionary. In 1951 Max was deported to Kirov. There he worked as an engineer at a clothes factory. When his deportation term was over, his family remained in Kirov. Alexander, their son, graduated from school, then from some institute, and then he taught at that institute. Later he moved to St. Petersburg, then Leningrad. Alexander is married. He has an adult daughter and a little granddaughter. He owns a real estate company. Max and his wife also moved to St. Petersburg in the late 1990s. Max died in 2002 at the age of 95.