Tag #147802 - Interview #78423 (Mikhail Plotkin )

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 [today the capital of Tatarstan region, Russia], arrived in Petrograd [today St. Petersburg] 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.