Levi Goldberg and his family

Levi Goldberg and his family

This is a dinner in the Goldberg house. The photo was taken in Nerchinsk in the 1910s. The woman in black is Shosya Goldberg, my great-grandmother, the mother of the Goldberg brothers.

Her son Levi is next to her, her son Abram is the fourth from the right. Shosya had given birth to five sons and lived in the house of one of them.

She was extremely active and restless to a very old age, visiting her kids' homes every morning. She spoke Yiddish.

The family was well to do. Isay Goldberg and his four brothers, Abram, Pinkhas, David and Levi, owned a manufactured goods shop with stationery, food stuffs, and household goods, and traded both whole sale and retail.

I remember one occasion my mother told me about. A shop-assistant started to wrap a piece of material around himself and at the moment grandfather Isay came in, and of course that shop-assistant was fired right then.

Each of the Goldberg brothers had their own house and servants. My grandfather used to hire a coachman, a cook and a housemaid, and he had some horses and a cow.

Grandfather Isay died of throat cancer before the Revolution, in 1910. He liked boiling water all his life and got sick. They treated him in Moscow, implanted a tube in his throat, but that kind of life couldn't last long.

Open this page