Eizer Alpert

This is a photo of my elder brother Eizer Isaakovich Alpert. It was taken in the 1960s in Moscow. Unfortunately, I don't remember when exactly this photo was taken, I recall only that he sent it to me by regular post.

My brother applied for the Moscow Aviation Institute upon his discharge from hospital. When he graduated from the institute, he got a job in Moscow, and stayed there to live till his death. He was an engineer.

When Father demobilized, my parents had to decide where they want to live and where they should go.

Their son lived in Moscow, and their daughter was in Leningrad. And they decided that since the son is a man and disabled, they'd better choose Moscow.
Later my brother got a three-room apartment and lived there together with our parents.

My brother married a Jew, and they had a child, a daughter called Sophia.
Later he divorced his first wife, and she immigrated to Israel.
Sophia stayed here: she didn't want to leave.

My brother got married for the second time, and they didn't have any children.
So they tried to decide whether they wanted to emigrate or not, because all relatives of his second wife left for America and lived somewhere, not far from the Canadian border.

It seems to me, my brother was very nervous, he worried very much, and he asked for my advice, whether to go or not to go. I advised him to go. I said, 'You would be old, and here no one would take care of you.

In America it would be better.' So they processed the papers, and had many troubles, and finally he died quickly. He went to his pal to give him a book, came in and died.

He was 71. And his wife left alone. He was buried according to Soviet secular traditions, not to Jewish ones.