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My grandfather Shloime Deich, sitting on the right, and one of his friends. The photo was taken in a photo studio in Radzivilov on the occasion of my father's 20th birthday in 1913.
My grandfather was born in Radzivilov in 1865. There were over 4,000 Jewish people in this town at the end of the 19th century. There were several Jewish schools, yeshivot and synagogues. There were also Polish and Ukrainian inhabitants. They had a good neighborly life and supported each other. In 1914, when World War I began, the Russian tsarist authorities accused the Jews residing near the border with Poland of cooperating with the Germans, and many Jewish families had to leave their homes.
My grandfather's family moved to Cherkassy. My grandfather owned a pharmacy in Cherkassy, but he didn't pay much attention to business and the family wasn't very wealthy. He wasn't religious, but he kept Jewish traditions under my grandmother's pressure. He was very fond of playing chess and reading non-religious books in Russian and Yiddish. He died of typhoid in 1918.
