Soon we received an apartment and a plot of land in the country. We built a very nice little dacha [summer hut]. It was on the hilly bank of the Volga in a very picturesque spot called Utyos.
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Displaying 49561 - 49590 of 50826 results
Elena Orlikova
We got used to all kinds of infringements because of our Jewish identity. When my husband’s colleagues could take a trip abroad, for example, but he couldn’t. Nobody explained to him why it was so, but everybody understood the reasons. However, the attitude towards Jews in Saratov was much better than in Kiev. Our friends’ children used to enter higher educational institutions in Saratov (with our help, to be frank), because it was impossible in Kiev or other towns in Ukraine.
Our daughter studied very well. She finished school with a medal. We recommended her to choose a different profession than we did, remembering all our problems and difficult life and career. She entered the Physics department at Saratov University, although she was not fond of physics. But she was good at all subjects anyway.
She got married when she was a second year student. She and her fiancé were 18 years old. Her husband came from a Jewish family. His parents were teachers. Their family came to Saratov during WWI. We were in very good terms with the boy’s family. We were not happy that they got married so soon, but we are glad that Luda is happy now.
My father retired, but as he was full of energy he couldn’t help doing something all the time. He became Chairman of a public court at the residential facilities maintenance agency (ZhEK) in Kiev. This was a kind of social activity. They were to review all kinds of disputes between neighbors, complaints or somebody’s indecent behavior, that were to be resolved at the social court sitting. My father was very enthusiastic about this work. He wrote prosecutors’ or attorneys’ speeches for these sittings. His neighbors respected him a lot and valued his opinion. And my father liked this a lot.
Misha Orlikov was a lecturer at the Polytechnic Institute by then.
My son Alyosha helped me to look after my husband and got very fond of medicine. It was very difficult for a Jew to enter Saratov Medical Institute, even though we lived there for a long time and people knew us well. And I decided to have his nationality changed in his Birth certificate. My son studied his last year at school and I decided that I had to change the data about his father in the documentation, filed at the civil registration office. I shared this idea with my husband. He was against it at first but then we agreed that it was the right thing to do and would help our son to make his dream come true. I went to Kiev and had an agreement with our Russian or Ukrainian acquaintance. We went to the court and he stated that he was the father of the child and wanted to claim all his rights as his father. We gave a bribe and obtained a new Birth Certificate. My son became Orlikov, it is my last name. Orlikov sounds like a Russian name. The name of his father was written Vilenskiy. Vilenskiy was the name of this friend of ours. And my son received his secondary school certificate as Alyosha Orlikov, Russian. So, he could enter the Institute. He was a good student but not as excellent as Luda. In a number of years I did the same trick with my grandson’s birth certificate. Dima, Luda’s son, also dreamed about medicine and later he also entered Saratov Medical Institute. Alyosha graduated from the Institute. His specialty was psychiatry. Now he is a pharmacist/psychiatrist. He is a very talented young man.
Later he was a post-graduate student in Saint Petersburg.
Then in the 1980s, he went to work in England. He was awarded a gold medal for his work there and the right to take a training course in the United States of America. He went to the US and stayed there. He works in one of the biggest psychiatric hospitals as a pharmacist/psychiatrist.
Luda also got divorced, regretfully. She lived twenty years with him, but their marriage didn’t work out.
Her son Dima is a surgeon in microsurgery. He and Luda live in the United States. He is working on obtaining a diploma to start his own practice.
In 1944 I transferred from Moscow Law Institute to the Law department at Kiev University. I was a first year student. At the beginning there were only girl students. But then gradually young men were returning from the army, those that started before the war and finished one or two years. One of them was Boris Veniaminovich Vilenskiy, born in 1923, a Jew. He returned in the rank of captain and was a very gifted and talented man. He was wounded and shell-shocked during the war. He started courting me and we fell in love with one another.
, Ukraine
His family lived in the town of Malin, Zhytomir region before the war His father was an accountant, a quiet and calm man. His mother was a housewife. She was full of energy. I heard she held official Party positions after the revolution. But she got disappointed in the idea of communism and was no longer a Party member.
One of them was Boris Veniaminovich Vilenskiy, born in 1923, a Jew. He returned in the rank of captain and was a very gifted and talented man. He was wounded and shell-shocked during the war.
I need to say that these young men that came from the front studied with much enthusiasm. One could tell that they were dreaming about the moment when they would be able to take to studying again. My Boris was an excellent student. We graduated from the University in 1948. It was the period of anti-Semitism and it was spreading promptly. Boris passed all exams and expected to receive a red diploma, issued to A-grade students. But he got a “3” in the history of the Party. But he had excellent knowledge of history and became a Party member on the front. He became a party member at the appeal “Communists, go ahead!” on the very front line, but he still got a “3” grade that closed the door to post-graduate studies for him. He was eager to continue his studies. However, my husband Boris Vilenskiy managed to finish his post-graduate studies within two years and defend his thesis. The subject of his thesis was history of state and law. He dealt with pre-revolutionary history and the legal reform of 1861 in Russia. He worked on this subject further on and was successful in his work as this subject was not widely explored.
We got married in 1948 upon our graduation. We had a wedding party at home. We had many guests: our relatives and friends. It was a nice party, very nice. It was not a Jewish wedding, but still, the main dish on the table was stuffed fish. My mother was great at making it.
My father loved Jewish sweet-&-sour stew and it was often served in our family.
, Ukraine
We lived with our parents in the communal apartment.
I went to work as a legal adviser to a small company. My father helped me to get this job.
Boris continued his post-graduate studies. He finished studying but he couldn’t find a job. This situation lasted over a year. He went to Moscow and spent hours and hours at reception offices. Their reasoning was always the same: no vacancies. But then other people were getting assignments when he was there. But for him there was no job. An official from the Ministry was mocking at him. He offered him a job somewhere far away and when my husband agreed he said “Oh, sorry, I’ve forgotten. There is no vacancy there either”. It was exactly because of anti-Semitism and because the state allowed to treat its citizens in this way. And only in a year’s time did they offer him a job at Saratov Law Institute to teach history of state and law. We were so happy wen my husband finally got a job. He accepted it without doubt.
I was fired. Many lawyers were fired. There were many Jews among lawyers. 1952 was on the way, the period of terrible anti-Semitism. They wanted to get rid of us. To be exact, I was offered a driver’s position at my work. But I couldn’t drive a car, besides, there was no vehicle in this organization and I refused. It was a paradox of the Soviet bureaucratic system: there was a driver’s position but no vehicle in this organization. But I had an experience of painting on silk. I went to work at a shop. They painted on little shawls and scarves. Our facility was at the basement. We worked in two shifts, but I earned twice as much as I did when I worked as a lawyer. The situation in Kiev was far from pleasant.
There were rumors in the city that the authorities were going to move Jewish people very far away, probably to Siberia or the Far East12. We still remembered what Stalin did to the Chechen13, Crimean Tatars and other people and realized that there had to be truth behind those rumors. So I asked my Russian friend Lida Govseyeva to take care of Ludochka if something happened to us. That was how much we were afraid. We believed that anything might happen to us.
We cared little about the death of Stalin in 1953. We didn’t feel any grief or happiness. I don’t understand why it was sort of a personal tragedy for many people. We realized that the situation in this country would never change in favor of its people, that nothing would change our life. Of course it was much later, in the 1980s, that we got to know the truth about him.
In Saratov Borya rented a small room from a Jewish woman from Byelorussia. She was a different woman with the views and morals that she had when she lived in a distant Bielorussian village. She didn’t treat her tenants well and she was scandalous but they had to tolerate her character. Boris didn’t earn much. He had to pay the rent and sent us some money. Besides, he always helped his mother.
There were not many Jews in Saratov. They were mainly those that stayed in Saratov after evacuation.
There were very few Jews at the Institute where my husband worked and there was no evident anti-Semitism there.
In Saratov we received one room and then another room at a hostel. This hostel was arranged on the ground floor of a garment factory. Students and lecturers of the Institute lived on this one and the same floor. There was a long hallway and a big kitchen with several gas stoves. We were in good terms with students and teachers. The hostel was located in the center of the town, not far from the Institute.
Later I also went to work at the Institute. It was not easy to find a job. At first I replaced the employees that were on maternity leave, or on vacation. I was a lab assistant, and later was promoted to senior lab assistant. I had to prepare all necessary literature, materials and meeting of the Department I was working for at the moment. Some time later I received a full-time position.
The conditions in this hostel were uncomfortable. There was one common toilet and no bathroom or shower rooms. On weekends we went to a nearby hotel, where we had to stay in line for hours and hours to get washed. As for the children, they were washed in the room. We heated some water and washed them in a washbasin.
My husband was very ill. He died in February 1991. We didn’t have close friends in Saratov and I moved to the United States to join my son there.