My mother Rosa Shlifer (Polisskaya). The photo was taken in Tashkent at the beginning of the war.
My mother was born in 1900. The only daughter, she was everybody's favorite in the family. She finished a Jewish primary school and a school for girls. She had music lessons at home. She had Karl Bluthner grand piano bought particularly for her to study music. She also had German classes with a teacher that came from the German colony. In 1917 my mother moved to Kiev. She lived in grandfather Beniamin's apartment in Nizhni Val Street in Podol. Grandfather supported her. I think it was probably there where she met my father.
They got married in Rzhishchev in 1921. Although my father wasn't religious they had a traditional Jewish wedding with a rabbi and chuppah and everything else that had to be at a Jewish wedding. After the wedding my parents went to Kiev where my father worked at the department of education and studied at the Faculty of Mathematics at the University. They lived in the apartment where my mother lived before she got married.
The majority of my mother's relatives and some of my father's relatives lived in Kiev. They often visited us. We met on birthdays and wedding anniversaries. We also celebrated Soviet holidays: 1st May and the October Revolution Day. The adults danced to Jewish and Soviet records and sang. We didn't celebrate Jewish holidays at home. Only once a year relatives came to celebrate Pesach with grandfather Beniamin. I didn't attend the celebrations, and not know, as it was. I preferred my friends' company.
