Galina Shkolnikova's father Idel Farber

This is my father Idel Mordukhovich Farber, in Crimea at the beginning of the 1930s. He spent his vacation there. My father was born in 1897 in the town of Berislav. He spent his childhood and youth in the town of Nikopol, where the family moved to. Everybody in the family had a nickname. My father's nickname was 'Chief', as he was the older brother. My father finished the Commercial School in Nikopol. It was the year 1915, and he was drafted to the army. From that moment on and to his dying day he had the nickname 'Soldier', which he was very proud of. To tell you the truth, grandfather Mordekhay took some appropriate efforts to enlist his son as self-determinative to the regiment. [Editor's note: a form of draft to the Russian Army during the years of World War I, which provided some privileges as compared to privates.] I don't know if he managed to participate in World War I military operations. He was a soldier at the beginning of the Civil War [1918-1921], but soon returned home and later served in the Red Army as a corps man for four months. In 1920 he entered the Kharkov Technological Institute and graduated in 1924 as a chemical engineer. After graduation he was assigned to Donbass, the Donetsk coal fields in the south-east of Ukraine, where he worked at JSC Koksobenzol in the town of Artyom. There was a friendly team of young people, engineers and doctors, and he met my mother in that group.