Tag #117113 - Interview #78547 (Leo Ginovker)

My wife and I lived in Kirov until 1958. I worked as an economist in a large organization called Kirles. A friend of ours, a musician, helped Irena to get a job as a costume designer in a theater. We rented an apartment. Mikhail, my wife’s son, lived with us. After the deportation was over, we returned to Tallinn and initially lived with my mother-in-law. Since, once again, I wasn’t allowed to live and work in Tallinn, I had to go to Karelia [north of Saint-Petersburg] for two years. There I worked with an organization that stocked lumber. When everything came back to normal, I returned to Tallinn and found a job as a supply department manager in an organization that provided and repaired farming equipment. I worked there for 30 years.

I took an economics course and graduated from a vocational school. By the 1970s I was an expert with a good record of experience and still not an old man; I was offered a promotion several times. But each time I declined the offer – I remembered having been a ‘socially dangerous element’ in the past and didn’t want to be too prominent. I was a cautious person and, although our family income was quite modest, I wanted to be able to sleep in peace. In the middle of the 1960s, my wife and I received a small apartment in the center of the city, which is still my home now. Mikhail, my wife’s son, graduated from an institute and is currently working as the director of the Jewish school in Tallinn, the school that I graduated from. Irena died in 1980.