Tag #118951 - Interview #100488 (Leya Yatsovskaya )

Our house was on the street called Synagogskaya [Synagogue Street]. A big synagogue wasn’t far from us. Then, in the1930s, our street was renamed Rybnaya [Fish Street]. My grandmother’s house was one-storied with an attic, which we always leased out. Our family was very poor and we wouldn’t have made it without the money derived from leasing. Like most of the apartments in Lithuania, our house was of a longitudinal layout: there was a hall from the entrance, then a kitchen, followed by a small bed-room partitioned from a drawing-room, which was used as a dining-room. There was a door in the dining-room opening to the yard. There was a big Russian stove in the kitchen, where my grandmother baked bread for sale. There were shelves in the hall, where she put freshly baked bread. There was also a bell in the hall. Visitors rang the bell when they entered the hall because at that time doors weren’t locked. We thoroughly insulated the door of the dining-room with blankets and the like as it was cold in winter time. There was a tiled stove in the room, but it required a lot of firewood. We didn’t have any, as it cost a lot of money and my father couldn’t provide for it.