Golda Sorkina with her great-grandson Alexander

Grandmother Golda with the son of my sister Polina - great-grandson Alexander, named in honour of grandmother's son, who was killed in 1941 by gangsters in Kazakhstan.

Living with grandmother Golda in Vsevolozhskoye, I brought her matzot from the synagogue in the city on Pesach, lit candles for her on Sabbath, so I could see her performing all the religious customs, but still we didn't have a very strict religious atmosphere at home. Grandmother observed kashrut.

She was a strong-willed woman enough. When at the age of seventy five she got to hospital with a cataract, people were asking her: "How are you going to live there, what are you going to eat, there is no kosher food there?" and she answered: "No problem, I'll eat whatever they give me". And she lived ten years more after that.

From grandmother Golda I learnt a little bit of Yiddish, so I can understand the language and I know some Jewish traditions from her stories. She died in Leningrad in 1970 in the family of her granddaughter Polina.

The burial service was read over grandmother Golda according to Jewish custom in the Small synagogue, which was situated in Preobrazhenskoye Jewish cemetery.

She is buried in the Jewish area in the "Cemetery of Victims of the 9-th of January ", in which 2 sites of land (numbers 62 and 64) were specially allocated as burial places for Jews. I remember how I took the priest back to the synagogue after he had completed prayers.