Larissa Rozina

This is a picture of me, taken in Kiev in the 1960s. After my studies I wanted to teach at school. Directors were willing to employ me, but their human resources departments didn't give their consent. They told me openly at one place, 'Our goal now is to promote Ukrainian employees.' At that time patent-right departments were established in many design institutes. They were checking a unit under development that had a patent abroad. They needed translators. By that time I had finished a course in German and French and studied Polish a little. I was employed by an institute and received the lowest salary possible. When I met my husband Aron Hankin in 1963, he was a teacher of mathematics at school. Later he read an announcement about a vacancy of a mathematician-cyberneticist at the Institute of Mathematics at the Academy of Sciences. He went to an interview and was employed. He was interested in the job, but the salary was very low and it took some time for him to accept the job. We got married in September 1964. We didn't have a wedding party. We just obtained our marriage certificate at the registration office. I moved into the apartment that my husband shared with his parents. It was an old communal apartment, and there was a 'splinter of the past' - an old woman in every room. I was short-sighted and had to put on my glasses to be able to tell who was who. Immediately after we got married we started paying fees for a new apartment. In 1965 we moved into a small two-bedroom Khrushchovka apartment. Our daughter Alexandra, or Sasha, was born in February 1966. When she was six months old I had to go to work and we started looking for a baby-sitter. A Ukrainian woman came for an interview and we came to an agreement with her. The following day her neighbor came to tell us that she didn't want to work for us because we were Jews. That was when we faced everyday anti-Semitism.