Tamara Koblik’s grandmother Sura Trostianetskaya with her daughters Keila Trostianetskaya and Sonia Gandelman

This is my grandmother Sura Trostianetskaya with her daughters Keila Trostianetskaya (I don't remember her marital surname) and Sonia Gandelman.  This photo was taken in Rezina in 1930 .

My maternal grandmother Sura Trostianetskaya lived in Rezina [a town in Bessarabian province, Orgeyev district, according to the census of 1897 there were 3 652 residents in Rezina, 3 182 of them were Jews]. My grandfather David Trostianetskiy married my grandmother way after 40. He had six children from his first marriage: Leib, Berl, Haim, Leika, Riva and Golda. He and grandmother Sura had five more children. I remember my grandmother Sura a little. I don't know her maiden name, but I know that her mother's name was Tema. Grandmother Sura got married, when she was very young.  My grandmother's sister Enia married my grandfather David's older son Leib. The father and the son married two sisters. However, it tool Leib and Enia some time to obtain a permit to get married. They visited several rabbis until one of them decided that they were not too close relatives and it was all right for them to get married.  He only told them that their successors could not have any relationships of this kind since this would be incest. When my grandfather died, his and my grandmother's children were still small. Keila, the oldest, was just 14 years old, my mother was 12, à and Isaac, the youngest, was 8. They went to lie with their relatives, which was a customary thing with Jewish families. After my grandfather died my grandmother began to bake Friday bread for Jewish families in Rezina and gained great respect of all Jewish housewives in Rezina. I remember visiting my grandmother in Rezina with my mama and my older sister Sheiva. Grandmother Sura was short and pretty - my mother was like her very much. There was a bunch of small children messing around her. I will never forget the way grandmother said: "Come here, I will make some the 'supa de legume' for you'. This word had so much magic in it for me until I got to know recently that it means 'vegetable soup' in Romanian.  But it sounded do beautiful!

My mother's older sister Keila also lived with grandmother. She divorced her first husband for his drinking problems and then she remarried. During Great Patriotic War grandmother with Keila's family and Golda were in the ghetto in Rybnitsa. In late 1941 grandmother and Golda and Keila's family were moved to Transnistria along with a big group of other Jewish inmates. On their way there, in Gvozdavka [Odessa region], they were shot - about 500 people perished there.

My mother's sister Sonia, born in 1910, married Grisha Gandelman from Tiraspol. He was a tinsmith. They lived in Orgeyev. During the Great Patriotic War he was at the labor front in the Ural since Bessarabians were not regimented to the army. [Soviet power did not trust the former Romanian citizens] During the war my aunt was with us in Makhachkala and Bukhara at first, but then she moved to her husband in the Ural where he worked in a mine. Her daughter Mania was born there. After the war they returned to Orgeyev.  In the 1970s, when Jews started moving to Israel, many of our relatives went there. Sonia's daughter Mania Duvidzon was one of the first ones to move there, her husband and aunt Sonia went with them. Aunt Sonia died in Haifa in 1990.