Frieda Stoyanovskaya's elder grandson, Victor Gordeyev

This is my elder grandson, Victor Gordeyev, Victor's son, born in 1954. The picture was taken in Ivano-Frankovsk in 1974. Victor chose the humanities direction after finishing school. But in the 1960s higher education in the humanities was closed for him, as he was a Jew. The only institute in Kiev that he could enter was the Institute of Light Industry. This institute gave him the profession that he didn't like at all. Victor began to identify himself as a Jew in 1940 when he saw Doctor Mamlock. [This was a German film about a remarkable Jewish physician who hoped for salvation. He was killed because he was Jew.] It was our mistake to take him with us. After the film he suffered from psychological shock. Later he was overtaken by the tragedy of the unloved profession. He saw the way out of the crisis by running away from his Jewish identity. He married a Russian girl. He wanted his children to have no problems with nationality in the future. He couldn't make up his mind about leaving the Soviet Union, either in the 1970s or the 1980s.