Yevgenia Liberman

Yevgenia Liberman

This amateur photo of Yevgenia Liberman, my mother’s sister, was made at her home in Moscow in 1950.

I think this photo was taken by my father's cousin brother, Mark Grinstein, who was a professional photographer. He gave one copy to my mother.

As for my maternal grandmother and grandfather, the Libermans: my grandfather, Aron Liberman, born in 1862, was a musician. He played the clarinet and was the manager of a small orchestra playing in a café.

My grandmother, Anna Liberman, nee Tahilevich, was born in 1869 in Azov. She was a housewife. Aron and Anna had eight children: Zahar, Pyotr, Matvey, Nathan, Yelizaveta, Yevgenia, my mother Raisa and Sarah. Their family must have been wealthy. All of the children, even the girls, studied in grammar school. Most of them lived in Rostov.

We were a close family. My mother and father loved each other and the children. My mother was very close with her brothers and sisters. She was particularly close with Yevgenia Liberman, who was single and worked as a teacher in a kindergarten.

I used to visit her in the kindergarten and was a nuisance. I was naughty and she felt uncomfortable about it since everybody knew that I was her nephew. I once drowned a crayfish from the zoo room of the kindergarten in the toilet and was driven out of the kindergarten with a terrible scandal.

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