This is my mother's sister Molka Tuman, my mother’s brother Isaac Tuman and Molka’s daughter Rosa. This photo was taken in Odessa in 1929.
Molka was born in the 1890s. She was a very interesting woman. She was short and pretty. She also worked at the carton factory. She married a Jewish young man named Aaaron. They had a daughter named Rosa. During the Great Patriotic War Aaron perished at the front and Rosa died in evacuation in Tashkent. Uncle Molka returned to Odessa alone and exhausted. She died few years after the war.
My mother's older brother Isaac Tuman was born, I think, in the middle of the 1880s. I don't know where he studied. He spoke Yiddish like the rest of the family. He was short, but he had strong fists. During a pogrom in 1905 there were stories about him. His house was one of the first houses in the street and once pogrom makers came to his house where he lived with his wife Tsylia. He lifted two bandits by their collars, banged them one with another and threw outside. Then other pogrom makers told everyone that there was an extremely strong zhyd [abusive word for a Jew] in a house in this street that wouldn't hesitate to kill. There were daring Jewish residents in Moldavanka. They were brave and could stand for themselves. There were fewer victims among them than elsewhere in Odessa during pogroms.
Before the Great Patriotic War my uncle was a worker in a carton factory. During the Great Patriotic War he evacuated to Tashkent in Middle Asia [3,200 km from Odessa, in Uzbekistan] with his wife. They had no children. Uncle Isaac died in the late 1960s at the age of 74. His wife died a year later. It happened so that I had to make all arrangements to bury uncle Isaac and aunt Tsylia in the Jewish cemetery in Slobodka where all our relatives were buried.
