Rita Razumovskaya’ son Alexei Razumovsky

This is a photo of my son Alexei Razumovsky, taken in the courtyard of our house in Leningrad. I think, it was taken in the late 1940s.

My elder son Alexei was born in 1946 in Leningrad. He has only a high school education, and then he became a car mechanic. He tried numerous jobs, now he is a businessman: in Opochka together with his elder son, also called Alexei, he builds hotels and houses. He is married to a Russian girl, his schoolmate; he was eighteen when he got married. His wife never worked, now she is deeply immersed in the Russian Orthodox religion. They studied in the same class, and suddenly he decided to marry her, my husband said that our son ‘went for seed’ [i.e. by getting married early he stopped developing and would reproduce]. And really, Alexei, the elder son of our son has three children, my great-granddaughter is eleven and she goes to the fifth grade. My younger grandson Denis, the second son of my son Alexei, is a programmer; he lives in Leningrad and has two sons too. So far I have five great-grandchildren. My grandchildren are ‘earth people’; they live in Russia and don’t want to leave.

Of course, my children knew that they were Jews, from their very birth. I never lied to them or hid this fact from them. What for? Olga couldn’t apply for the university, and in the 1970s someone beat up Alexei, perhaps, not even thinking or guessing that he was Jewish. So at home we talked about it, we had such conversations, but I don’t remember that we ever mentioned Jewish traditions.