This is a photo of my sister Irina Rozen, nee Kiselgof, who was a real beauty as a young girl. The picture was taken in Leningrad in the late 1950s, I think.
I have two sisters. One of them, Galina, is five years younger than me, she was born on 24th February 1927, and the second one, Irina, was born in 1938, when our mother was forty-two. I remember that I was studying in the tenth grade, and they called me out of lessons, because my sister Irina was born, and I wasn’t happy about it. When Galina was born, I asked my parents to take her away, to take her back. They named one of my sisters after some woman called Galina, whom my father liked, as a young man – maybe, he had some secret love story, I don’t know exactly – and why they named my second sister Irina, I have no idea. My sisters went to another school, which was situated on Volkhovskoy Road.
Compared to me, my sisters were married many times. Galina was married twice, and Irina is married for the third time now. Her first husband was Russian, and the second one was a Jew, a real Jew, a nationalist. And Galina’s second husband was a Jew too, and the first one was Russian. Galina became a Math teacher, and Irina is an engineer.
I continue to communicate with my sister Irina. She is retired already, but she still works for the First Medical Institute: constructs different equipment, for example she made a tool to measure the composition of blood. There are quite a few such tools, but her tool is cheaper and more exact. People buy it with pleasure, even though there is no industrial production.
Irina is very easy-going; it is easy to influence her. Her husband is an artist, and she is attached to him. They are very good hosts, they like guests, and they always have some company, even very ordinary ones, and some of their guests behave like they are homeless.
