Tag #156040 - Interview #94776 (Grigoriy Stelmakh)

We arrived at the Shantala railway station where the families of the school employees were accommodated. From there, from Shantala, my childhood memory took its beginning. This was a station lost in the woods, somewhere at the distance of 200 km from Ulianovsk in the depths of Russia. My mother went to work in a hospital. Our Russian landlady Manya was very kind. There were six of us: my mother, my two sisters and I, my grandmother and my mother’s sister Frania. We had one room in a wooden house. We, kids, slept in bed with my grandmother and my mother and her sister slept on the floor. It’s hard to say anything about food: I didn’t remember anything else. Everything my grandmother made tasted delicious: pancakes with some herb, soup with unknown ingredients or pies. My grandmother was very handy with making a meal from ‘nothing’ and other women came to learn from her. My grandmother tried to observe Jewish traditions. She boiled few casseroles to make kosher utensils. I was told that there were sweets, ice-cream, candy and oranges in life, but I took it easy like any child since I didn’t know anything about them.