This is my father Leib Kogan with my grandfather Gersh Kogan. The woman and the girl are their close relatives, but I don't know their names. The photo was taken in Chernovtsy in the 1880s.
My grandfather was born in the town of Zinkovtsy, Podolsk province, in the 1850s. My grandfather’s family was religious. They observed all Jewish traditions and my father was raised religiously. In the pictures I have of my grandfather, he wears traditional Jewish clothes, a beard and payot and a yarmulka or a hat. I don’t know what my grandfather did for a living. He died in the 1890s.
My grandmother was born in the 1850s. I don’t know her first name or her maiden name. She was a housewife. My grandmother died in the early 1880s, when my father was a small boy. Besides my father my grandparents had two sons and a daughter from what I know.
My father was born in Zinkovtsy in 1873. He studied at cheder for three years. After my grandmother died he went to work as a servant for a wealthy Jew in the town. In the late 1880s, when he was 15, he moved to some relatives in Odessa. He became an apprentice of a typesetter at the printing house of the publisher Kozman.
