Chavah Shubinskaya

This is my wife, Chavah Shubinskaya, nee Fayerstein. The photo was taken in 1939 in Kiev. I continued to study music on my own. I had a record-player at home. One time I was buying records and met my neighbor, Grisha Boginsky. He asked me, 'Where are you going?' I said, 'Home'. He said, 'Wait, let's go to this house, there are interesting girls there. I will introduce you to them'. I said, 'Fine, but what about my records?' He said, 'No problem, take them with you'. So, we went to that house. There were two young girls: a blond and a brunette. I was introduced to them and suddenly I said, 'Wait a second, you are Fayerstein'. I was right: she was my far relative from Zvenigorodka. Her first name was Eva. She was eleven years younger than me. I took her out. But first I asked, 'Oh, what about my records?' She said, 'You can leave them here'. So I left my records at her house and came by the next day, as if to pick them up. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I married her in 1939. There was no wedding ceremony; we simply went to the registration office and began to live together as husband and wife. In those times people often did just that. Eva worked at a Jewish collective farm in Zvenigorodka. She came to Kiev to do accountancy courses. She didn't finish those courses: she was working and studying at the same time. Anyway, we got married. When I got married we began to rent an apartment on Novo-Prozorovsky Street, across from my parents'. The street was so narrow that I felt both living at home and living with my wife. We had no kitchen, so we cooked on a Primus stove. We had a small corridor, where we cooked. My wife worked at a secret construction site on Zhukov Island. I worked at the Academy of Sciences. Our life was fine.