Sofia, my husband's older sister, sent this photo to her family in Saldus from Russia. On this photo Sofia is a student of Moscow University. This photo was taken in Lisichansk, Photographer S. Luriye. The photo was taken in the 1920s, to the best of my knowledge.
My husband Iosif Perlman was born in Saldus, Latvia, in 1901. His father's name was Leizer Perlman, and his mother's name was Braine. I don't know what his father did for a living, but his mother was a housewife. There were seven children in the family. I don't remember his older brother's name. He moved to Palestine in the late 1910s. Then there were daughters Sofia and Mary, sons Henrich, Benno, Zvi and my future husband Iosif, the youngest in the family.
Their family was a religious Jewish family. The boys studied at the cheder till the age of 13, when they had their bar mitzvah. All children finished a gymnasium. During the tsarist time Sofia and her father moved to Moscow. Sofia was going to enter Moscow University, and her father went with her to support her there. However, they had no opportunity to return to Latvia due to the revolution in Russia, when Latvia became an independent state in 1918. Residents of the Soviet Russia were not allowed to travel to Latvia or even correspond with their relatives. They stayed in Moscow and didn’t see the rest of their family before 1940, when Latvia was annexed to the Soviet Union. Iosif and his brother Henrich went to visit them there.
