This photo was taken in 1919 in Petrograd.
From left to right: Dina Breido, my mother, Tsylya Katsnelson, younger sister of my father.
My mother, Dina Abelevna Breido [nee Strunskaya] was born in 1898 in Polotsk. She became an orphan at the age of three, separated from her brother and sister, and was brought up by the family of Isaac Galyorkin, her uncle.
She did not get any education, but she was taught to read and write. She was also taught how to sew, cook and do household work. She was physically strong, she could ride a horse, work in the garden, climb trees and liked to give orders since childhood, as she had an independent nature.
When mother met father, she was engaged to Nota Galyorkin, her other cousin, Moisey Galyorkin's son; but she left with father gladly and, as she said, "never regretted that for a single moment in her life", in spite of father's difficult fate. My parents got married in 1918 in Leningrad.
My father's sister Tsylya Lvovna Katznelson’s husband Lev [Lyova] Israilevich came from a family of rabbis the Davidov clan. He was not religious though.
He was a pharmaceutist by occupation [he finished college], but he worked in advertisement business, he also advertised the household chemical goods produced by the Breido Brothers.
Lev Katznelson participated in the construction of Belomorkanal [All-Union Communist Construction in Siberia], which was constructed by convicts. He was doing administrative work there. He also worked as an administrator at the workshop of the famous Leningrad prison "Kresty".
My father did not like many of Lyova's actions, but when Lyova dragged grandfather's body on a piece of plywood to Preobrazhensky cemetery in the winter of 1944, father said that God might forgive Lyova for his sins for such a deed.
The Katznelson family lived together with the grandparents, Tsylya's parents, in one apartment. Tsylya had a sight disability, so she did not study and worked at the cooperative of the blind. T
hey stayed in besieged Leningrad during the war. They had three children: daughters Mira and Vera and son Israel.
Tsylya died in 1961 of a heart attack and was buried in the Jewish cemetery.
