Engelina Goldentracht's parents Vladimir Zorin and Lubov Pavlova-Stravets

My parents, Vladimir Zorin and Lubov Pavlova-Stravets (sitting), at a resort in Gagry in 1936. The man behind them is a stranger. My parents met at one of their party related events. My mother didn't know my father's real name until he invited her to his home and introduced her to his family. They got married at the beginning of 1924. At that time many young people merely announced themselves husband and wife and began to live as a family. That was my parents' plan, but their parents convinced them to register their marriage. A Jewish wedding was out of the question at that time. My parents celebrated their wedding with their party comrades and left for Berdiansk on one of their party assignments to organize a commune in a village. In summer my parents went on vacation to Sochi or Yalta [popular holiday resorts in the Soviet Union] and sent us to our grandparents in Dnepropetrovsk. Our family never celebrated Jewish holidays. My mother didn't allow our grandparents to speak Yiddish to us. My parents spoke Russian, although Yiddish was their mother tongue. In 1934 the capital of Ukraine was transferred from Kharkov to Kiev, and my father was assigned to be director of the NKVD cultural center in Kiev. We received a big three-bedroom apartment in Rosa Luxemburg Street in Pechersk. [It was an elite neighborhood in Kiev where all government institutions were located and where high governmental officials lived.] It was a spacious apartment, and my father's parents and his brother Jacob moved in with us.