Boris Boguslavskiy and his family

This is a picture of my father with family members during recreation in Slavianogorsk in 1931. Before World Wat II they often went on a holiday together. The first on the left is my aunt Klara Tarnopolskiy, my father's sister Esphir Libina, an acquaintance, my father Boris Boguslavskiy, my mother Anna Gandelsman and Esphir's husband Naum Libin. My father was an intelligent man. He read a lot, knew the [then] modern poets Mayakovsky, Yesenin and Blok and he wrote poems himself. Women liked him and he had the reputation of being a 'playboy' before he met my mother in 1925 and fell in love. On a photograph of my mother, father and his ex-girlfriend he wrote the words addressed to my mother, 'I used to think that sentimentality was just spree, but here - a little spring has broken in my chest'. My parents got married in 1926 never to part again. My mother went to live with her cousins. There were four sisters, their last name was Tsyfrinovich and my mother was raised by them after her father died. They were her mother's cousins. My mother grew up a modern emancipated young lady under their influence. She couldn't even speak Yiddish and when my father introduced her to his parents they couldn't communicate because they didn't speak Russian. My mother finished grammar school in St. Petersburg and after the Revolution she and her aunts moved to Kharkov. In Kharkov my mother entered a course in law. She never worked as a lawyer but she was a very educated woman.