Dobrina Rivkind’s husband Lev Isaacovich Rivkind with his sister Sima Isaakovna Rivkind and father Isaac Lvovich Rivkind

This is my husband, Lev Isaacovich Rivkind, his twin sister, Sima and their father, Isaac Lvovich Rivkind. The picture was taken in Gomel in 1939. Unfortunately, I cannot say on what occasion it has been taken.

My husband was born in Gomel in 1925. He was son of my father’s half-brother. We got acquainted in our childhood and knew each other all our lives. His childhood passed in Gomel. My husband was not religious, he grew up in a typical Soviet family. Isaac Rivkind and his children loved each other very much. Lev would tell me many times he had a happy childhood and father was indeed a good friend for him. 

World War II took Rivkind family unawares in their home town of Gomel. Right after the beginning of the war all of them evacuated to Kuybyshev (now Samara), where Isaac Rivkind’s brother’s family lived. They stayed in Kuybyshev all 5 years of the war. After the war they all returned home to Gomel. Upon return, Lev’s father Isaac got seriously ill: I don’t remember what
kind of illness it was, but it was then a pretty common thing to happen after all the hardships and stress people suffered during the war; besides, he was not a young man already. This was when he got back all the love he had given to his children, because they were his support indeed. Sima was studying at Pediatrician Institute in Leningrad at that time, but when she learned about her father’s illness she put aside studying and came to Gomel to nurse her father; later when he got better she returned to Leningrad, resumed studying and got the diploma of a doctor. Lev had plans then to go Leningrad to study as well, but he abandoned these plans and stayed in Gomel, to help his mother take care of the father. Lev entered an institute in Gomel instead and got higher education in his home town. He graduated from the Belorussian Railroad Transport Institute in Gomel. We developed a relationship at that time and after graduation he came to the North, to Kirovsk and we got married in 1959. I was 27 at that time and my husband was 30. He worked there in a big "Apatite-stroy" trust. "Apatite" was a large industrial enterprise at that time. It consisted of mines and factories, where ore was processed into apatites.