Lidia Korotina
Kiev
Ukraine
Interviewer: Ella Orlikova
I, Lidia Matveyevna Korotina was born October 16, 1922 in Nikolaev. At the time Nikolaev was in the Odessa region, but it later became the center of a new region. It’s a big shipbuilding town, very beautiful, with many parks and theaters. It’s a very green town, too. The Jews and other nationalities got along very well.
Family background
Growing up
During the War
After the War
We lived in Nikolaev until 1933, and that’s where I went to school. There were three of us in my immediate family: my father, Matvey Yefimovich Korotin, my mother, Isabella (Beila) Matveyevna Korotina, and myself. My father's brother Moisey, his sister Bertha and his older brother Froim (Yefrem), lived there too, as did my father’s parents.
Maria Abramovna Korotina, my paternal grandmother, observed Jewish traditions very faithfully. We had family gatherings at my grandparents’ place every Friday. My grandmother made great dinners with lots of delicious food. She served stuffed fish, patties made with meat and fruits, and roast with prunes. Her sons and daughters and their children and grandchildren went there to celebrate Pesach, Purim, Chanukah and Sabbath with them. On the holidays she always served a traditional Jewish meal. Prayers were said before the meal, and on the Sabbath, grandmother lit the candles.
I remember that my grandfather, Yefim Korotin, was paralyzed after an accident and had to wear a sort of corset. He broke his spine and couldn’t move and was confined to his bed in a cast. My grandmother told me that he injured himself when he stumbled and fell when he was carrying a heavy sack at the mill where he worked. Despite this, he led a full life. He was interested in everything that was happening around him. He read a lot, including Jewish books. Sometimes my grandmother used to read to him. I remember my grandfather’s face well: he had a small gray beard and gray moustache.
My grandparents had five sons and two daughters: Yefrem, my father Matvey (I asked my grandfather once “Why did you name him Matvey?” and he said it was really “Mordukhay”), Basia, or Bertha (that’s how she was called in the family), Isaak, Moisei and their younger daughter Fima. Fima (Serafina) lived with my grandfather and grandmother and always helped them around the house. They lived in a small one-story house, with two rooms and a small kitchen with a stove. Washing facilities and toilet were outside. They had a garden with fruits trees and , where grandmother grew any verdurea small v
My father was born in 1893. During World War I, he was a private in the army and he and his older brother Froim (Yefrem) were captured. During their captivity they had do to meaningless work, like moving stones from one corner to another.
My grandmother’s maiden name was Konstantinovskaya. She graduated from school in Warsaw and was an educated person for her time. She spoke Ukrainian fluently and was able to recite the poetry of Shevchenko, Pushkin and Nekrasov. She used to recite poems to us grandchildren when we came to visit her. My grandmother loved reading. She had many books by Russian and foreign classical writers. She had an excellent knowledge of poetry and got very upset when she found out that one of her grandchildren didn’t know some poem. She would start explaining about the writer and his works. She wasn’t a healthy person, though. She had a thyroid problem, which affected her movements and manner of speaking. She was always very wise and reasonable, and she loved her children very much. Everyone in the family got along very well her; her son-in-law or daughter-in-law – they were all her children, too. She made delicious food: clear soup, stuffed fish and stuffed chicken. Her younger daughter Sima was her main assistant. She was our grandfather’s favorite. She became an excellent doctor after graduating from the Odessa Medical University. But all our grandparents’ children supported their parents, so there was no lack of anything in the house.
All my grandparents’ children received a good education in Nikolaev. Basia, Isaak and Moisey became pharmacists. During the war (World War II) Isaak was a captain in the military medical service and took part in some battles near Stalingrad. Later he was posted to Teheran. Yefrem, my father’s older brother, graduated from an accounting school and worked as a chief accountant at big plants for many years. Sima, my father’s younger sister, served in the army as a captain in the medical service. She didn’t have a family of her own and took care of my grandmother, who died in 1943 in evacuation, in the village of Tikhoretskaya.
All of us spoke Russian, but grandmother and grandfather and sometimes Uncle Yefrem spoke Yiddish, especially when they didn’t want us children to understand what they were saying.
My grandfather told me that Korotin was their original name, but they had relatives named Gomberg and Verbovetskiy. They came from Bobrinets, a Jewish town in what was the Yelisavetgrad district (now it is the Kirovogradskaya region). There was a large Jewish population before the war, but now no Jews live there. The fascists killed all the Jews in the ghetto in 1941 – those who survived moved to other cities, or to Israel.
My mother’s mother, Lubov Moiseyevna, was from Jankoi, Crimea. Her last name was Ternorutskaya. She was very tiny and pretty and had an extraordinarily beautiful complexion. The story goes that my grandfather kidnapped her, as her parents didn’t want her to marry him. My grandfather’s name was Moisey Solomonovich Brodskiy. He was a very tall man with an imperious voice. He was in the Navy, and my grandmother’s parents didn’t want their daughter to marry a sailor.
My grandfather was an authoritative person. He was an assistant attorney, and the story goes that he couldn’t stand any violation of the law. They told a story in the family how once he saw a drunken policeman walking along and beating a Jewish boy. My grandfather took this policeman by his collar, tore off his shoulder straps, slapped him on the face with those shoulder straps and let the Jewish boy go. He had to hide in people’s attics for a long time afterwards! He had beautiful handwriting. When his younger daughter had to go to school and she had no textbook, he copied this textbook himself, by hand. We kept this notebook with his handwriting for many years.
My maternal grandparents’ family observed the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. They had six children: three sons and three daughters. Yasha was their oldest son. He took after his father – he was tall and had a strong character. Then came their daughter Klara, a very beautiful woman. Then came their son Semyon (Syoma) and my mother Beila. Then there were Nema and the youngest, Fania, who was born when my grandmother thought that she couldn’t have children any more. The two oldest died in Moscow. Syoma survived the blockade, worked at a medical equipment factory and died in Leningrad. Nema perished in the vicinity of Smolensk during the war.
My mother died in 1967. Despite ill health, she was a very vigorous and strong person. She was a very kind woman and could deal with hardships. Her youngest sister married my father’s brother Ponia, who met her when she was living with us. He took her to Kharkov, where hey lived happily until 1942, when the fascists killed them in the street in Kirovograd. My grandfather and grandmother were also killed by fascists in the street in Kirovograd. They had a small apartment in Kirovograd on the ground floor. My grandfather didn’t want to leave his home. When the Germans came they chased all Jewish people out into the streets from their homes. They were all going along the streets. My grandfather had a sort of heart attack and couldn’t walk. He stopped, but the Germans didn’t like it and shot both of them there, in the street.
My mother and father met in Kirovograd. Mamma was a very beautiful woman and my father was just struck by her beauty. When he took her to his father to introduce her, my grandfather told him that she was too beautiful for my father. They loved each other very much and were devoted to one another.
In Nikolaev, we lived in a ground floor apartment at 44, Plekhanovskaya street. We had two rooms with a small hall between them, and two verandahs. My father worked as consultant at the Dneprobug organization, which was concerned with construction of the river fleet and other river projects. He was a state expert for investigating cases. He was very smart and intelligent, and he worked in forensic medicine until the end of his life. He wasn’t a member of the Communist Party.
We had a good life. There was a piano in one room. My mother’s younger sister played the piano, and I was taught to play, too. Mamma didn’t work. We had a daytime maid. We also had a cook, Maria Kirillovna. She was a Russian woman and a very good cook. She didn’t sit at the table with us. She first served our meals and then she had her meal in the kitchen. In the evenings our relative Iosif Verbovitskiy would come and play the violin. Those were beautiful evenings. When my (paternal) grandmother wanted to visit us she came in a cab. She moved in with us after my grandfather died (in 1930). Among our furnishings, there was a beautiful cupboard, a leather sofa, a dinner table and some chairs around it, a floor clock and a tea table with a samovar on it. The wardrobe I have now in my room is from our home in Nikolaev. The two chairs in my kitchen are also from there.
I went to kindergarten for some time. I remember that we walked and sang there. I remember them taking me to the German school. Our teacher was Theresa Avgustovna, an old German woman. She put a red plus on the reports of the children who wrote well and a dark-blue minus to those who didn’t. My writing was very poor, but I tried so hard that once she gave me a little red plus, turned to the class and said “Congratulations, she has joined you now.” The language of teaching was German, too, and during our holidays we spoke German. There were many Germans living in the south of Ukraine.
I went to a secondary school and was a pioneer. I remember wearing a red necktie. I knew that I was a Jew from the very beginning. I knew this because one of my grandfathers was named Haim, and the other was called Brodskiy -- typical Jewish names. I didn’t notice any anti-Semitism at school, though, as there were Jews, Russians and German pupils in our class. When we transferred to the Russian school I sent my documents to the Moscow extramural institute of foreign languages. I was admitted to the 4th year. During the war, in Samarkand , I graduated from a military translators’ school. But I didn’t work as translator. I was studying to improve my German. As for the attitude of my family towards my being a pioneer and a Komsomol member, it was considered normal. All people lived the same life with the same standards then.
I read about the famine (in the 1930s) in books. We didn’t feel it. Nikolaev was a rich southern town. I don’t remember anyone from our family or anyone from the area starving.
I don’t remember any specific conversations in our family about politics or about Stalin. When we heard what was happening around we were horrified. This person was in exile, that one arrested – terrible, we thought, something was wrong there. However, we couldn’t figure it out. As for Germany, it was only what we were told at school that mattered for me.
In our family they spoke very little Yiddish. The Jewish question was not touched upon during the pre-war years. The nationality of our friends never mattered. My mother and father never cared about it either.
In 1940 I entered the Philological Department at Odessa University. I had no problems in entering it or studying there. I enjoyed studying there. I had friends: Tamara Trilistskaya and Faina Nikiforova. There were many boys among our friends. We loved to go to the Opera Theater. We had classes in the evening. After classes we went to the theater, arriving for the second or third act. And we always sat in the gallery.
In Odessa there was a famous Jewish actress named Liya Bugova. She worked in the Jewish Theater, and then she went to the Russian Drama Theater. She was a good actress and we tried to attend her performances -- she performed different roles from the Russian and Jewish classics, as well as in modern plays.
I vividly remember June 22, 1941. It was a Sunday, and I was planning to go see Mirra Yanover, my classmate, who was staying at her dacha, or summerhouse, to pick up some notes to prepare for my tests at the Institute. I went by tram. It passed by a military college. There were soldiers lining up in the yard, and people in the tram talked about what it might mean. I said that I thought it was some kind of training. We were totally convinced that nothing negative would happen. We were sure that the war would finish in a month’s time with our victory.
We had a radio at home. (The whole family lived in Odessa then.) Very soon the air raids and black-outs began. We left Odessa and went to my father’s sisters and grandmother Korotina in Nikolaev. We took nothing with us -- we thought that Daddy would go back and pick up our belongings. But he had some things to do in Nikolaev and he couldn’t go back to Odessa. Then we went to Makhachkala from Nikolaev by train.
It was still possible to buy train tickets, but when we arrived at Dnepropetrovsk a bombardment destroyed the bridge. The train arrived at one side of the Dnieper river and was to depart from the opposite bank. Air raids began and the three of us ran over some plank work to catch the train. From Makhachkala we went to Krasnovodsk by boat and were planning to go to Tashkent, where Odessa University had been evacuated. We went part of the way in a railcar and another part in a carriage with plank beds and hay to sleep on. There were no comforts, of course. At one station, Tikhoretskaya, my father went out to get some water and then cried out to us to get off the train, as his mother and sister Sima were there. Sima was a doctor with a military unit. My parents and I went on our way, but Sima and Grandmother stayed at that station. Someone on the train told us that the University was in Samarkand and we got off the train there. My grandmother in fact died at Tikhoretskaya station. Sima buried her and then came to join us in Samarkand. Later she was sent to a military unit in Kovel, Belarus.
I entered the Medical University and lived in the students’ hostel. My Dad and Mamma rented a room in the outskirts of the city. There were ten girls in the room where I lived. We were of different nationalities: Jewish, Korean, Lithuanian, a Jewish girl from Gomel. We all got along and there was no talk about national origin. We shared any food that we had. I received 200 grams of bread on my ration card and I ate it during classes. I also bought a kilo of grapes. After classes I went to my parents. My father worked at the Department of Justice. And my mamma loved farming. She helped their landlady in her vegetable garden and farmyard. When I came there they gave me lots of food. I ate all I could eat. My mother also gave me food to take back with me, but on my way back to the University I would finish all the food that was supposed to last for three days, because I knew what it was like to feel starved.
We had studied at the University for some time when they announced that it was moving to Tashkent, because some military college had moved to Samarkand and they needed facilities to house them. Then I entered the Uzbek Medical Institute and studied there for half a year. But when it came to doing laboratory work, and they brought human fingers on a tray (for us to work on) I knew I couldn’t see things like that. There was nowhere else to study except a Teachers’ Evening Institute. Given my University studies, I was accepted as a second year student. I also had to get a job, and I went to work at the industrial complex. I maintained their card index log. I received a bread card for this work and in addition could have some kind of soup in the canteen. This lasted until 1943. Then we moved to another apartment. In 1943, my Dad was summoned to Kiev after the city was liberated. He left, and my mother and I stayed in Tashkent. We were starving. It was cold in our small apartment – there was a small room and some kind of a tambour. Somebody brought us a huge pumpkin to eat. I remember sitting and crying because I was so hungry. My mother didn’t work. She was seriously ill. She had severe diabetes and a heart condition. But still she got up at four in the morning and went to unload bread to get me a loaf.
I met my future husband at Odessa University. His name was Mikhail Shoihet.. He wrote to his parents and asked them to find out where I was. They asked their acquaintances in Odessa and someone told them that I was in Samarkand. They came to Samarkand and met with my father. Then they told Misha my address. He began to write me poems and letters. He asked me to come and visit him. My parents and I went to visit him in August 1942. He was an instructor in a military unit in Turkmenia, 40 kilometers from the border. The heat was oppressive there, over 40 degrees Celsius. There was sand all around, not a single tree. He told me that things were very uncertain and that his unit could be sent to the front - and so we got married right then, on August, 8, 1942. To be sure, there was no wedding celebration amid all the war and hunger. We simply registered. My parents knew nothing about it. When I told them what had happened, they thought it wasn’t a good time to get married, but Misha believed that by marrying me he would not lose me.
Distant relatives of ours came to Samarkand, Arnold Romanovich Moshynskiy and his German wife, Alisa Ivanovna Aidemann. Their only son, Yura, perished on the front. On November 26, 1943 we received a telegram from my father telling us to come to Kiev. It was a long trip by train. We arrived in May 1944. Dad had given us the following address: 18, Bolshaya Zhytomirskaya, Apt. 3. We lived in this apartment as one family with Alisa Ivanovna and Arnold Romanovich for a year and a half or two years. There were three rooms, but there were also other tenants. Then Arnold received a two-room apartment and moved out with Alisa. Then my father received a separate apartment, and we moved there. Arnold died in 1965, and Alisa remained alone. She was my only relative in Kiev.
Meanwhile my husband was transferred from Turkmenia to Leningradskaya village, in the Krasnodarskiy region. In 1945 I went there to join him. He was with a military unit, an air squadron. At four o’clock in the morning the engines started making a terrible noise. It was all very tense – every day somebody crashed or died. I worked at a school teaching Russian. We rented a room in a house. It was a big room with five windows. There was a stove and it burned reeds. The stove took a lot of fuel. We went to cut it on the plots of land assigned to us. It was very cold, but very exciting. It was beautiful there in the village, only very cold. At night the dogs barked. There was a well in the yard. I would put on my husband’s fur boots and go out to bring in water.
Then the war was over. The demobilization order was issued at the end of 1946. We returned to Kiev. My husband went to work for the aviation newspaper and also studied at the University’s extramural department. I taught Russian in a girls’ school. I had graduated from Kiev Pedagogical Institute by then.
The first time I went to the school, I was no different from my pupils, as they hadn’t studied during the war and were as old or older than I was. I worked in this school for several years and I have very nice memories of it. Then I fell ill with tuberculosis and didn’t work for two years. Then I worked in another school for 19 years. This school was located at the poorest neighborhood in Kiev – Tatarka. I taught literature and aesthetics. At one point, Pavel Yakopvlevich Gomolskiy, the administrator of the Philharmonic, came to school to organize a music and literature lecture center. I offered my services as a lecturer. He invited me to the Philharmonic for an interview, and I got the job. They paid very little, however. I earned 18-20 rubles per month, but it was an interesting job, with possibilities. It was a new environment for me. My pedagogical experience and ability to communicate with children turned out to be very helpful. I worked at both the school and at the Philharmonic until 1971, when a new director was appointed. He told me to make a choice between the school and the lecture center. I left the school and came to work at the Philharmonic. At this lecture center we set up a program on “Music in Lenin’s life”. Then I made two other programs on Lenin: “Vladimir Lenin at the auditorium” and “Portrait and time.” We believed in what we were popularizing, and each time we found some features in Lenin that confirmed his extraordinary personality. It was different from how our leaders behaved. I worked for few years with a symphony orchestra. On Sunday they gave concerts for youth in the Column Hall of the Philharmonic. I worked there until 1986.
Work in the Philharmonic was considered part of the ideological front, so all the lectures and concerts were checked very thoroughly. There had to be something included about the Motherland, Lenin and the Party. Even in programs for young children there had to be a song about Lenin. I remember a funny occasion. It was during the celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth. Everything was dedicated to Lenin. At one point I was conducting a performance at school. Our performance was a children’s opera, “Masha and the Bear,” and the children, first and second graders, were all dressed up. I had to tell them about opera and about the main person in the theater organizing everything. I asked them “Well, who knows what he is called?” And few of them raised their hands, stood up and said “Lenin!” It was so funny that neither Masha nor the Bear could sing afterwards. I made an effort to remain serious and said, “Of course, Lenin is very important. But Lenin was thinking about the state affairs and the person organizing things in the theater is called a producer”. Ideology was everywhere in the society.
My nationality at that time already imposed borders that I was not supposed to cross. There were limitations, but I didn’t realize it at that time. After the war, I felt what it meant to be a Jew. Nobody called me “zhydovka” but I felt some discrimination. I think it was in 1952 that they were sending two or three people from Ukraine to the All-Union meeting in Moscow, and I was among them. I was the only aesthetics lecturer, so I was invited. And then when the Chief of Department saw my nationality in my passport he said, “Why a Jew? Couldn’t you find a Russian?” And then in 1953 I took entrance exams to the post-graduate course at the Pedagogical Institute. I passed the exams in German and Marxism-Leninism with the highest of grades, but they spoke to me in a very rude manner and told me that I had not been admitted. You know, it is always hard to pinpoint just why one is rejected in the artistic mileux - whether it is because of jealousy or because of nationality. Now I understand why I was never awarded the title of Honored Employee of Culture or some other title.
For many years Rahil Lvovna Lefler was art director of the Column Hall at the Philharmonic. She was a dedicated person and a professional. She devoted her entire life to the Philharmonic, and her opinion was considered of great significance. They had to accept Jewish administrators, because they provided jobs and a possibility to earn some money. I can’t remember any direct anti-Semitism at the Philharmonic, but there was this tinge in the air.
We always lived as one family with my parents – my husband and my parents were great friends. My mother did all housekeeping, as the rest of us were all working. My mamma was very conscientious, so she always tried to do her best to have enough food in the house and to keep it cozy, regardless of how she was feeling. There were always people visiting – mine, or my father’s or my husband’s friends. Mamma always loved the Jewish New Year celebrations, and fasting on Yom Kippur was mandatory for her, too. Recently, I too have begun fasting. We celebrated Purim and Pesach. But I don’t remember celebrating other holidays. For Pesach, we cleaned up our home and put beautiful kosher dishes on the table. Mamma called them Easter dishes. There was everything that should be on the table at Pesach – matso, bitter herbs, eggs, chicken. Besides, mamma cooked a lot of other delicious things. There was no bread in the house during Pesach. Our friends and relatives came to us, and we all enjoyed ourselves. It was a holiday, but we didn’t have strict rules for the celebration. We had plenty of food at home. In summer we had an opportunity to go on vacation. However, it all seemed an ordinary thing at that time. We didn’t have any luxuries, no dacha or car, and we didn’t travel, although I have started travelling in recent years.
My father worked as investigative expert and was a very responsible employee. He was already very ill, and I used to accompany him to his court sittings and then we would go back home together. I always had questions for him. And he explained everything to me very professionally. My father specialized in business cases. He spoke with pain about what was happening around us and expressed his feelings in the circle of close people at home.
But the propaganda and the way we were brought up were very strong. We were raised with a strong faith that everything in our country did was correct, that we were the most fair country, and that all our laws were are in the name of the people and the life of the people. We had no idea that life could be different.
My father’s Jewish origin didn’t have an impact on his career. His name sounded Russian. But perhaps he faced this, too. My father died from a heart attack on July 30, 1960. He was 67 years old. Mamma told me that she called an ambulance when he didn’t feel quite well and kept telling him to hold on and that she was going to tell me to come from Odessa, where I was on holiday. But he told her to not interrupt my vacation. He died that same night, and my mother died six years later, in 1966.
My husband worked as a journalist, a military correspondent. He smoked a lot and this did him a lot of harm. He had a heart attack and then a stroke, and he died in 1984. He was only 60 years old.
Ida Shteinberg, the wife of Abram Katsnelson, was a fellow student and friend of mine. Abram Katsnelson is a famous Ukrainian poet. He is Jewish, but Ukrainian was his mother tongue, and he wrote in Ukrainian his whole life. Still, his books were not published. His brother, Ilia Stebun, was deputy director of the Institute of Literature. He was accused of cosmopolitanism and even had to move away from here. He first moved to Zhytomir and then to Dnepropetrovsk or Zaporozhiye. “Rootless cosmopolitans” – many of my friends had to quit their jobs because of their Jewish nationality. I can remember meetings at the Union of Writers where many Jews were accused of communicating with “cosmopolititans.” I remember this well.
Abram Katsnelson has written a number of books on the history of Ukrainian poetry. He lives in Los Angeles. He remembers well what things were like in the Soviet Union in the 1940s and later. The struggle against “rootless cosmopolitans” was the beginning of an anti-Semite campaign lasting for many years.
I remember Mark Moiseyevich Plisetskiy, a distant relation of Maya Plisetskaya, the ballerina. He worked in the University and was a great folklore specialist. He was sent away from here for being a “cosmopolitan.” He was one of the many who were forced to leave. The works of Jewish poets and writers were not published.
I’ve always read a lot, including Jewish writers like Sholom Aleichem, David Gofshtein, and Perets Markish, but I was always more interested in classical art and literature.
At present I am a member of the Veterans of the Stage and Deputy Chairman of the Council of the Veterans of the Stage at the national Union of the Activists of Theater. It’s a voluntary position. We take care of the veterans of the stage and I enjoy it. I also give lectures at Hesed (the Jewish charity organization) or in the libraries.
I don’t think there is no anti-Semitism nowadays, but it’s different, it is not state anti-Semitism. It’s still there, though. One mustn’t forget it.
In the past 10 years we’ve heard and read more about our country. I have been in the United States twice. I’ve seen the life of Jewish people in that country. I realize that Jewish people made a great contribution to the world culture and civilization. I’ve become interested in this Jewish subject. I’ve read about the Jewish participation in the Great Patriotic War and about how unfairly this has been forgotten. I met some Hesed employees and I feel that they need me to give lectures there. Later they suggested that I open a dining room for single Jews at my place, and for five years I cooked lunch twice a week for eight Jewish people who came to my home. They were all different from each other, but gradually they formed a sort of family. We talked – they were all intelligent people. We celebrated holidays and birthdays. They were all single people and it was good that they could feel that somebody needed them. I enjoyed doing it, although it was tiring.
We celebrated all the holidays and I tried to learn as much as possible about the traditions. I asked people at Hesed and they told me. We celebrated Pesach and Rosh Hashanah, Chanukah, and Purim according to the rules. We attended workshops at Hesed about holidays and celebrations. Those eight people still call me every now and then, and I realize that this time was a big part of our lives. This drew me closer to the Jewish world.
I’ve changed the subject of my lectures. My lectures used to be about art and outstanding people in art. Nowadays they have to do with Jewish life. I learned a lot about famous Jews -- writers, poets, and artists, and I read a lot about the Holocaust. I try to impart all this to people who for many years, like me, had no possibility to learn about it.
I work in libraries a lot, and I learn about the things I never even guessed before. It’s always good to know as much as possible.
I go to the synagogue more often, too. I do not always understand what is going on there, but when I come there and take my seat, I have a feeling of peace. All my troubles leave me. I think about my loved ones and myself. However, there are many things that I don’t know or don’t understand.
Loneliness is my major problem. Perhaps I’m just trying to fill my life with something by working at Hesed and with the theatrical community. I cannot complain because I have enough food and support from Hesed. But loneliness is a terrible thing. Perhaps I’ve done something wrong. If I had changed something in my life I wouldn’t be alone…
My relatives and friends invite me to come to Israel. Regrettably, I never was there, in general I have not abroad much. I very much want to see this country, to see how they live there, but I’ve never had a chance. And I’ll be 80 soon, and I’m not feeling well. Unfortunately, I can’t change anything in my life now.
