Tag #153761 - Interview #102451 (Solomon Manevich)

We lived in the apartment that my father received in Kiev. The house belonged to Kiev eparchy. It was in Rylski Lane near the St. Sophia cathedral. [Editor’s note: St. Sophia Cathedral was a Christian church in the center of Kiev built in the XIth century. After the revolution it became a monument of architecture.] Before the revolution tenants of this house were clergymen and after the revolution the Soviet power made these apartments communal. Our apartment had 7 rooms. It belonged to a high-level clergyman, but at our time there were few other families in the same apartment where we lived. I think there were five or six families and each of them lived in one room. The toilet, bathroom and kitchen were of common use. I don’t remember names of our neighbors. After my father left, my mother’s brother Nohim, his wife Riva and their daughter Sarra moved into the second room in this this apartment. Since then we lived together, sharing food and sorrows and joys of life. Every family had their own lamp in the toilet and kitchen with a switch in their room. Every family had their own table and a primus or kerosene stove in the kitchen. [Editor’s note: a primus stove was a small portable stove with a container for about 1 liter of kerosene that was pumped into burners.] There was also a schedule for toilet cleaning that all tenants had to do in turns and there were always quarrels about it. I have a dim memory of a Jewish family that were always quarreling about cleaning the toilet. On the door of the toilet room there was a schedule of using the toilet where specific hours when every tenant of the apartment could go to the toilet were indicated. The schedule was based on a number of members in the family: the more there were the more often they had to do cleaning. It was based on work and school hours of all tenants. Working tenants and students could use the toilet in the morning and housewives and other tenants that didn’t work could use the toilet afterward. We didn’t really communicate with the other tenants.