Gherda Kagan’s husband Yevgeniy Grinblat at a meeting with his co-students

This is my husband Yevgeniy Grinblat (standing in the center) and I Gherda Kagan (sitting on the right) at a meeting with his former co-students. This photo was made in Odessa in 1974. On the left sitting my friend Nadezhda Furman. Her husband Yakov Furman is beside her, they both live in Los Angeles now. The man on the right in the center is Leonid Goldenberg, deceased. This meeting organized my husband and he conducted it himself. We had a good life in the 1960s - 1970s. My husband was chief engineer of a plant and earned well. I also had a high salary. I often went on business trips all over the country. I met people in planes, at railway stations and in hotels. I was sociable and liked talking with people. I was a devoted Soviet person for a long time. Although I saw mismanagement and bureaucracy in our tinned food industry, I thought they were our local drawbacks related to Odessa area. I read Soviet newspapers and believed that everything was well in the soviet country. My daughter Natalia always laughed at me calling me an idealist. My husband was critical about the soviet reality. He went crazy seeing Brezhnev on TV. I asked my husband to not criticize the soviet regime in a loud voice for the fear that our neighbors could hear him. My husband continuously faced discrimination: they never gave him permission to travel abroad due to his national identity. He was sure that KGB had information about his aunt who moved to America before the revolution and sent her relatives in Odessa minor money amounts via a bank. When new director with anti-Semitic convictions came to the plant, my husband began to have problems.