Leonid Karlinsky's family

My maternal grandmother (wearing a white shawl). My mother, Bertha Karlinskaya, (maiden name Tomchinskaya) is seated beside her. My father, Meyer, and my mother's younger sister, Ida, are standing behind them. This photo was taken in Kharkov in 1927. My father, Meyer Karlinsky, and my mother, Bertha Karlinskaya, were typical representatives of a generation of Soviet youth who were so fond of the revolutionary and communist ideas that they rejected their past. They didn't recall or tell their children about their roots or about the history of their families. They were obsessed with the idea of communism and rejected everything that had existed before - the Jewish way of life, religion, traditions and their mother tongue. In Kharkov my father got a job at the shoe factory. He was an active Komsomol member, and met my mother, Bertha Tomchinskaya, at one of the meetings. My mother was born in 1905 near Golaya Pristan in the vicinity of Kherson. She had eight siblings. Mother spent her last years with her oldest daughter, Fania. When the war began Fania and her family were evacuated, but my grandmother didn't want to go with them. She judged Germans by what she knew about them from the neighboring colony, and she didn't believe the Germans could do any harm to the Jewish people. When Kherson was occupied, the Gestapo took my grandmother's house to use as their office, and of course my grandmother was one of the first to be shot. I also knew my mother's younger sister Ida. She married a man in the military and lived in Odessa. During the war she and her children, Tania and Volodia, were evacuated to Ashgabad. Her husband, Lyova, was at the front line throughout the war. After the war he worked at the Officer Training School in Odessa. Aunt Ida died some time in 1965.