Vladimir Slopak’s aunt Sopha Shneiderman

My aunt Sopha Portnaya on her 16th birthday in 1936. The photo was made in Odessa.

My mother's younger sister Sopha was born in 1920. She studied in a Russian secondary school. During the war she was in evacuation in Kutaissi in Georgia where she married Moshe Shneiderman (born in 1910). On 26 May 1945 her son Ilia, my cousin, was born. Sopha divorced her husband in 1946 and lived the rest of her life with her son in Odessa. She worked as a ticket collector at the cultural center and in the 1970s she got a job at the Musical Comedy Theater where she worked until the end of her life.

My last aunt, Sopha, died in 1987. Sopha and her sisters, Anna and Fira were buried in the Jewish cemetery. It was their will to be buried near one another to be together for good.