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This is me, Igor Brover, my mother Ida Brover and my paternal grandmother Udia Brover. This photo was taken in Ivanovka village in 1936. This photo was particularly made to send it to my father who was on mandatory service in the Red army. There was no photo shop in our village. All of our family photographs were taken by a visiting photographer.
I was born on 12 October 1935. My Jewish name was Israel, but I was called Igor. We lived with my grandmother and grandfather in a small one-storied house near the kolkhoz administration in the very center of the village. People got up and took to work very early in the village. My father was the first in the family to get up. He woke up the others. My mother and grandmother woke me up and got everything ready for me to go to the kindergarten. Grandmother Udia did the housework and my mother went to work. On her way there she took me to the kindergarten. There were about twenty children and two tutors in the kindergarten. We played with toys or with one another like in any other kindergarten, and our tutors read books to us. My mother picked me at 7 at the earliest. When we came home, my grandmother had dinner waiting for us. My grandmother did the cooking in our family. We waited till everybody was home to have dinner together. We set the table together and together we cleaned it. It has always been like this in our family. My favorite food has always been gefilte fish and cutlets. However, we rarely had them. We usually had borshch [a traditional Ukrainian beet soup], and boiled wheat cereal or corn. We seldom had buckwheat since it was rarely available. It wasn't decent to be capricious about food. We were to be grateful for what we had. The only thing I wasn't allowed to do was to refuse milk that I didn't like, though we had milk from our cow.
