This is my mama Hana Finkelstein and her younger sister Maria Finkelstein. Mama is sitting in the foreground, Maria is standing behind her. This photo was taken in 1915. Mama is a student of the Legal department in the university and Maria is a student of a gymnasium.
My maternal grandfather and grandmother had three children: Son Isaac Finkelstein, born in 1892, daughter Anna Sherishevskaya (nee Finkelstein) - my mother, born in 1895, and younger daughter Maria Kaz (nee Finkelstein), born in 1901. The children were not religious. They were loyal to their parents' religiosity, but they did not participate in any observances.
My mother finished a gymnasium for girls in Kiev. Golda Meir studied there as well 5 years later. There was a 3 or 4 % admission quota for Jews in those gymnasia, but there were also private gymnasia, and my mother must have finished a private one. My grandfather could afford to pay for her studies. My grandfather also bought her a Schreder piano. Mama played the piano and I also studied music for some time. It was destroyed during the Great Patriotic War. After finishing the gymnasium my mother entered the higher course for girls at the Legal Faculty in Kiev University. He finished the course in 1917. She studied the czarist laws that were cancelled after the revolution. So mama went to work as a librarian. My parents got married in 1924. I don't know how they met - they never mentioned it. I, their only child, was born in 1926. My parents spoke Russian at home and switched to Yiddish, when they didn't want me to know the subject of their discussion. Mama and papa had finished Russian gymnasia and were both atheists.
Maria finished a gymnasium in 1917 and married Izia Kaz, a Jewish engineer from Kiev. I remember aunt Mania well. She lived in one room in our apartment, and worked in an accounting department with her husband, who was also an accountant. She was kind and cheerful. During the Great Patriotic War she evacuated with us. She perished in an accident at the military chemical plant in Dzerzhinsk near Nizhniy Novgorod in 1942. She was buried there. Her husband returned from the war, but we had no contacts with him.
