Ilia Rozenfeld with his wife Yelena Rozenfeld and son Alexandr Rozenfeld

My family: I, Ilia Rozenfeld, my wife Yelena and son Alexandr. This photo was taken in Kiev in 1970, when my son was visiting us on his vacation, this is the last photograph where I like the way I look. As for my later photographs, I don't show them to anyone.

Since 1948 I worked in the Design Machine tool Institute ‘Giprostanok’, and in 1953 I was promoted to chief of sector. In 1954 my Institute gave us a small two-bedroom apartment with 16 and 9 square-meter rooms. However, this was our own apartment, and I think that our life improved significantly from then on. In 1960 I went to work in the Academic Institute and entered an extramural postgraduate course in Moscow. In 1963 I defended a dissertation. I didn’t face any prejudiced attitudes. Until the early 1990s I was chief of laboratory. I would have probably had a higher position had I been a member of the Party, but I never joined the party. Through all years of my engineering career I felt like writing, but writing something different from what the Soviet ideology appreciated, something that my heart suffered through. I started writing in the middle 1980s, and in 1990 the magazine 'Kiev' published my story 'Shadows on the snow' about the hard period of 1937.

In 1947 my wife Yelena went to her first job in the laboratory of the Podol district hospital where she worked for 50 years from then on. Alexandr had all excellent marks at school. There was the atmosphere of friendship and trust between us, like there was in my father's house. We also socialized with our relatives. Once a year we visited my mother and aunts in Poltava. Ania's cousin sisters from Poltava and brother Yuriy from Moscow visited us. We also traveled to Moscow. We lived like all other Soviet intelligentsia families: from one pay day to another. We didn't have a car or a dacha, but our family spent vacations at the seashore in the Crimea or Caucasus every year.

In 1965 Alexandr finished school brilliantly. Alexandr decided to enter Mechanic Machine Building Faculty in Moscow State University. We were surprised that he managed to enter it without any acquaintances or help. Many Jewish students joined Moscow University that year: the authorities must have cancelled the quota of Jewish admission. Alexandr studied his first year in Moscow and then got a transfer to Kazan University for personal reasons. He studied well. Alexandr obtained a job assignment free diploma, when he could find a job where he liked. He returned to Kiev, but he couldn’t find work for a long time. Though he was a brilliant mathematician, he failed to get employment in the Institute of Cybernetics or Institute of Mathematic. Our acquaintances helped him to get a job at the Institute of Town Planning. In 1978 Alexandr defended his candidate dissertation, and in 1988 he defended his doctor’s dissertation.

In 1972 after finishing his college my son married Tatiana Zevakina, a Ukrainian girl. My wife and I bought a cooperative apartment for them on our saving and what we borrowed from our friends. In 1973 their son Dmitriy was born.