Tag #153266 - Interview #94182 (Rachil Lemberg)

After moving to Ananiev my parents rented an apartment until they managed to buy an apartment in a small house with the money their relatives helped them to collect. In another section of the house an old Jewish woman and her daughter lived. We had three rooms and big kitchen with a Russian stove 7 in our section of the house. There were smaller stoves to heat the rooms. Since coal was much too expensive the stoves were stoked with wood.  There were few fruit trees, a vegetable garden and few facilities in the backyard of the house. We fetched water from a well not far from the house.

There was a children’s room, my parents’ bedroom and the third room was occupied by my mother’s single sisters Haika and Munia.  There was plain furniture in the apartment. The only expensive piece in the house was my parents’ bed of dark wood with carved curved back.  My father was a scale operator at the mill. My mother was a housewife. She did all housework by herself. However, she wanted to have additional earnings and she bought a “Singer” sewing machine to sew at home. Other villagers paid her with food or money. I remember that our Ukrainian neighbor gave us milk for my mother’s sewing. It was hard to buy food products at the time. My mother made bread from corn flour for a week. She covered it with linen napkins and it didn’t get stale for a while.