Elka Vinograd, her brother Haim and their friends

Here are my sister, Elka Vinograd, nee Muchnik, and my brother, Haim Muchnik, with their friends, whose names I don't remember. My sister is the 2nd from the right, my brother is the 2nd from the left wearing a light-color shirt. The photo was taken in the  Lozakov Photo Studio, Orhei, in April 1927.

My sister Elka had finished a Romanian gymnasium with honors a few years before. Then she went to Bucharest, where she entered university: Uncle Iosif Pagis advised her to enter the Pharmaceutical Faculty. Several years later Elka realized this wasn’t what she wanted to do. She liked literature. While continuing her studies at the Pharmaceutical Faculty she entered the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy of this University. Elka graduated with two diplomas: in Pharmacology and Literature. She went to work in the Jewish school in the town of Arciz. She worked as a teacher. In 1933 she married Mendel Vinograd, the director of this school.

Haim was born in 1910. In the 1920s there was a number of Zionist organizations in Bessarabia in those years. My older brother Haim moved to Bucharest at the age of 15 and entered a vocational school. Haim became a high-skilled worker. He also became fond of Zionist ideas of restoration of Israel [then Palestine]. He joined a Zionist organization of young people, I don’t know the name of this organization, and was preparing for repatriation to Israel. In a camp in the Carpathians he met and fell in love with a Jewish girl named Tubele. When he told Mother about Tubele and his intention to marry her, our mother got very angry: Tubele came from a poor family and wasn’t our equal. Haim left his fiancée and moved to Israel in 1927. He got married there and had a daughter. Haim was involved in the establishment of the kibbutz settlements in Israel.