Yevgeniya and Iosif Barvish

This photo from our family album portrays my mother Dynia Bera Dvorkina, later Yevgeniya Borisovna Barvish, with her second husband, Iosif Barvish. The picture was taken in 1930 in Leningrad. When she fled to Leningrad, Mother couldn't take me in right away. After my mother arrived in Leningrad she lived incognito with one of her sisters on Grazhdansky Prospekt. Then her sisters found her a Jewish fiancé. They got her acquainted with a representative of the working class with the help of some well-wishers. Iosif Borisovich Barvish worked as a glue-maker at a factory manufacturing musical instruments. He came from Kazan, arrived in Petrograd at the beginning of the Revolution. His wife died and he had four grown-up sons. He was an unsophisticated man, a nice one, hard-working, without interest in lofty matters and politics. After his wife had died it became difficult for him to cope with his sons. They were serious grown up people but none could cook and keep the house. Three days after Mother was introduced to this man they decided to get married. She was satisfied with his social origin; she would become the wife of a worker and wash off her past sins as a dispossessed person. He thought it convenient that he would have a wife who would feed him and his sons. When Mother got married, Barvish had five rooms in a separate apartment on Znamenskaya Street. Such conditions were perfect at that time. Since Mother married Barvish and they registered the marriage, she became the wife of a proletarian, a worker. She didn't tell anyone that she had been repressed, she held her tongue. She kept the house, fed her new husband's sons. As soon as Mother found out about Barvish's job she started to ask him to bring home some glue. He began to bring back a small bar of joining glue every day. Mother, being a born entrepreneur, sold these bars secretly at the marketplace. In those times there was a shortage of all goods. The well-being of the family grew significantly owing to my mother's underground activity. As a result everything developed rather well.