Hirsh-Leib and Hesse Tsivian on their wedding day

This photograph shows my parents, Hirsh-Leib and Hesse Tsivian, nee Heiman, on the day of their wedding, 1st May 1917, in Tartu. My father was born in 1895. He finished cheder in Kreizburg, his mother tongue was Yiddish. To help his mother he started working at a young age. At first, he was a salesman's apprentice in a shop in Kreizburg, and later he worked as a salesman in a fabric shop in Riga for several years. At the end of 1916 my father went to Petrograd. He intended to look for a job there. Petrograd was on the eve of revolution - there were mass-meetings, strikes, and plundering. My father didn't like this at all, he liked order in all things, and after a few months he decided to go back to Latvia. On his way to Riga he stopped in the small Estonian city of Tartu. He liked the city - it was a quiet neat place with a Jewish community and, which was essential for my father, it had a synagogue. One Saturday while visiting the synagogue a beautiful young lady attracted his attention. This is how my father met his future wife, my mother, Hesse Heiman. My mother was born in 1895 in Tartu. She was the youngest child and the favorite in the family. When she was 15 she went to Warsaw to study sewing. My mother studied there for two years in a school that trained tailors of top qualification. She had a certificate confirming her graduation from that school, it was later posted on a wall in my mother's workshop. In 1912 my mother returned to Tartu and worked there for several years in a privately-owned sewing workshop. In March 1917 as she came to the synagogue on Saturday she saw a strange young man who looked at her with curiosity. My mother was very pretty and, besides, she was tastefully and fashionably dressed. They started to see each other. My parents' wedding took place on 1st May 1917, in the same synagogue where they had first seen each other.