This is my husband's father - Zakhar Nikolayevich Matsin (Zakhary Nisonov), holding a photo of his 4-year old daughter Nina - my husband's sister. The snapshot was done in 1928. Yuri was born in 1931, when his father turned 54. Unfortunately, this is the only photo of his father that remained. He was born in 1876, presumably in Vitebsk, because it is said in his diploma - "Vitebsk resident", though all his relatives lived in Rostov-on-Don. Unfortunately, we know very little about the relatives of Z.N.Matsin. There is only information that his grandfather Nison Matsin taught Hebrew.
Zakhary Nikolaevich graduated from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1911, the department of singing, receiving a degree of "free-lance actor". His very interesting documents (Case of Matsin Z.N., Fund 361, inventory fi 1. case fi 2610) are stored in the historical archive in Saint Petersburg. They show under what kind of supervision the Jews lived at that time: Certificate on Reliability from the police of Vitebsk; a reference on supervision from the police of Saint Petersburg; a sanction to leave for vacations and visit other cities in Russia in 1910. From the posters of that time we know, that after graduation from the Conservatory Zakhar Nikolayevich served in the People's House named after Nikolay II (now the building is occupied by the theatre "The Baltic House"), sang in operas "Boris Godunov", "Dubrovsky", "The Queen of Spades", "Traviata", "The Buffoons", "Rigoletto" and others. This information is obtained from the Theatre Museum and Museum of F.I.Shalyapin. Later Zakhar Nikolaevich worked in the Theatre of Musical Comedy, and from 1935 in Mariinsky Theatre. In the autumn of 1941 he, together with other employees of the theatre, was evacuated to the city of Molotov (nowadays Perm), where in April, 1942 he died of typhus.
