Tag #142522 - Interview #91884 (Leonid Aptekar)

There were 2-storied stone houses in the central part of the town. They housed administrative offices or belonged to wealthier people. The others were clay-walled huts. The clay was a mixture of clay, chopped straw and horse manure [air-brick]. Our house where we lived before the Great Patriotic War [8] was one of them. My mother’s brother Teviye, a tinsmith, installed the tin sheet roof on our house.  There were 3 rooms, a fore room and a big kitchen with a Russian stove [9] in the house. There was a store shed and a living stock shed in the yard. My grandmother kept ducks, geese and goats. There was a meadow and a river near our house. There was a water mill with a mill-pond on the river where our ducks and geese swam. There was an orchard and a vegetable garden by the house.