I, Leo Lubich, and my wife Rosa Finkler, photographed during a walk near the Opera Theater in Lvov in summer 2002.
We didn’t have children and that was all right with us. We could enjoy life and went to the theater or restaurant every week. We spent vacations at the seashore in the Crimea or Caucasus. We had enough money. Rosa worked as laboratory supervisor at the machine unit plant. I worked at a shoe shop and then got a job at the Progress Company. I was Human Resources Manager there. I never faced any anti-Semitism.
I retired in the early 1980s. Rosa and I lived our life with ease and in love and peace. Many of our friends moved to Israel and invited us to join them, but we never even considered the idea. We love our Motherland, the country where we were born and where we lived our best years. We love Ukraine and its people. I have led an active life since I retired. I play sports and was a member of a jogging club for a number of years. Nowadays I write articles and poems that are published in the Jewish press and in the town newspaper of Lvov Vysokiy Zamok (High Castle).
Of course, perestroika had a disastrous impact on pensioners - we were deprived of our savings. We get miserable pensions. But, on the other hand, the arrival of Ukrainian independence in 1991 provided excellent conditions for the development and revival of Jewish life and culture. We often go to the Lvov Drama theater and get free tickets from the Jewish community. We watch performances of Russian and Ukrainian classics. We are active members of the Sholem Aleichem Association where Rosa and I take part in parties and concerts. Rosa recites poems written by popular Soviet poets: Evgeni Evtushenko and others, and I perform tricks. Rosa also invites popular actors and producers to parties. We observe Jewish traditions: we buy matzah at Pesach and fast on Judgment Day. We try to lead a traditional Jewish life and follow all the rules – everything that we were not allowed to do during the Soviet regime. We are grateful to Hesed, a Jewish charitable organization that provides food and medication to old people. And they also offer support in the form of kindness. That said, I don’t think of myself as an old man – not yet!
