Samuel and Sarah Zeldovich

This is a picture of my parents Samuel and Sarah Zeldovich (nee Chernenko) after their wedding. The photo was taken in Nikolaev in 1924. My father was born in Nikolaev on 20th September 1888. He finished a grammar school in Nikolaev and then a commercial college in Vienna. In 1914 my grandfather sent my father to Palestine to get familiar with our historical Motherland. At that time World War I began and all young people subject to recruitment were ordered to return to Russia. So my father returned to Russia. He was recruited to the tsarist army in which he served until the end of World War I. He returned to Nikolaev in the early 1920s. My mother was the youngest in the family. She was born in Zultz in 1902. I don't know where she studied. My grandfather Avrum Chernenko taught her Jewish traditions and prayers. Grandmother Ella taught her housekeeping and cooking. She made traditional Jewish food: gefilte fish, chicken and strudels. My mother lived with her parents in Nikolaev before she got married. She helped her mother about the house. My parents never told me how they met. I guess they met when my mother's family moved to Nikolaev. They got married in 1924 and only had a civil ceremony. They lived in my grandmother's house, which had a number of rooms. They also had housemaids.