Tag #151932 - Interview #78238 (maya kaganskaya)

I know very little about my father's family. I knew my paternal great- grandfather, Gershl Radomyshlski, who was a clerk before the Revolution of 1917. He died in 1940 at the age of 102. My paternal grandfather, Meyer Kaganski, born in the 1870s, worked for his older brother, Moshe, who was a leather specialist and became rich during the Civil War. During the Civil War a gang 19 of a White Guards 20 officer came into town. My grandfather Meyer, a handsome tall man with a big dark beard, was the first they met on their way. The bandits brutally murdered him. My grandmother Pesia had to raise her three children on her own: her daughter, Malka, my father, Yakov, and her younger son, Omo. This incident happened in 1918 or 1919. I know little about Grandmother Pesia. I know that after her husband perished she tried to move to America with her younger son, Omo, but he didn't receive a medical certificate due to some health problems and they stayed in Radomyshl. I saw her once in 1940 when she visited my mother. My grandmother was very religious. She wore a kerchief, celebrated all Jewish holidays and Sabbath, observed Jewish traditions and followed the kashrut. She died after the war, sometime in 1946.

My father's sister, Malka, born in 1900, married Semyon Katsovski, a Jewish man. In 1923 her son was born and shortly afterwards she moved to Tashkent [Uzbekistan] with her husband and son looking for a job. A few years later Malka developed symptoms of mental illness and after a few years she got into a mental hospital in Lubertsy, Moscow region, where they lived. Semyon waited for her several years. When the Great Patriotic War began he left for somewhere and there was no contact with him. There's no information about Malka, either. She probably died during the Great Patriotic War.