This is my wife Anna Kravets with our granddaughter Olga.
The picture was taken in Moscow in 1987.
I got married in 1953. Mother managed to find a wife for me, the daughter of her friend. I liked quite different girls, but I couldn't explain that to my mother.
Besides, she would have never approved of my marriage to a non-Jewish girl. Strange as it may be, I was an obedient and loving son and it was easier for me to agree with my mother than to hurt her with my disobedience.
My future wife, Anna Kurnik, was an only daughter. Her mother worked as chief of a canteen. Her father was an accountant. Anna was born in Moscow in 1928.
She graduated from the foreign language department of the Moscow Teachers' Training Institute and worked in a secondary school as English teacher.
We hadn't been dating for a long time. All the same mother wouldn't have let me dodge from marriage this time, so we sent the documents to the state marriage registration office.
Our daugther Stella was born in 1954. She finished the secondary school where my sister and I had studied and entered the Moscow Culture Institute, the Library Studies Department.
My daughter wasn't raised Jewish; most Jewish children back in that time weren't. After her graduation, she became a librarian at the State Library of Technical Science. She got married in 1986. I don't want to dwell on her husband. Stella kept her maiden name Kravets.
We exchanged our apartment for another one: three rooms for my daughter and one room for my wife and me. In 1987 Stella gave birth to her daughter Olga, and in 1991 she gave birth to a son, Mikhail. Stella left work after her daughter was born.
My wife and I helped her raising the children. I take pride in her children. Now, my granddaughter is finishing compulsory school. She is also enrolled on preparatory courses for the Russian Medicine Academy.
She passed the exams of the first term, in March she will be taking exams of the second term and after that she will enter medical academy and have a certificate of the secondary education. Besides, Olga finished a seven-year music school.
