Maya Dembo with her husband

This is an amateur picture of me and my husband Lev Freidman, taken when we visited my father's sister, my aunt Cecilia Dembo in Riga, right after we got married.

This is her apartment. Grandmother Sara was still alive at that time. She also lived in this apartment, together with her daughter.

My husband Lev Freidman is standing beside me; I am 27 here and he is 32. Alexander Dembo, Cecilia's adopted son can be seen in the right corner of the picture. He is sitting on a sofa.

I met my husband in 1957 at my friends' place in Kirovsk. Lev was a Jewish man. He was born in Leningrad in 1926. His father didn't have any higher education but he was a very good practical economist and was a member of a lot of expert commissions.

Lev had twin sisters, both were doctors-pediatricians, they are still alive; and a brother, who died in 1999. Lev studied at the Leningrad Institute of Law, but he didn't manage to obtain a diploma, as he was arrested and exiled to Kirovsk.

Serving his time there, he got acquainted with the prosecutor of Kirovsk, his name was Finkelstein, and he had studied at the same institute in Leningrad, but they didn't know each other.

I met Lev in the Finkelstein family, who I also got to know when in Kirovsk. I married Lev at the end of 1957.

After his sentence in Kirovsk Lev finished a construction equipment installation technical school, and all his life after that he was occupied with industrial construction at Krasny Vyborzhets plant, at Srevdlov machine-tool plant, at Izhorsky plant and others.

He was well-known among constructors, respected and loved. Regardless of the fact that he was a constructor, we weren't able to get an apartment, we were in line for a long time and finally we built a cooperative apartment.

In 1968 we moved into a two-bedroom cooperative apartment on Varshavskaya Street, where I still live now.