Mark Golub with his wife Maria Golub

My wife Maria Golub [nee Dinavetskaya] and me at our wedding ceremony in Kiev in 1962. Maria, a Jew, was born in Uman in October 1927. Her father Naum Dinavestky was an accountant and her mother Anna Dinavestskaya was a housewife. They didn't celebrate any Jewish traditions and they spoke Russian in the family. They had two daughters: Maria, and Sophia, who was born in 1915. In 1934 the whole family moved to Kiev. Maria went to school and finished 6 grades before the war. We didn't have a wedding party. We had a civil ceremony and my mother cooked a festive dinner for all the members of our families. We lived in my wife's apartment with her sister (her parents had died by then). Later, after Maria's sister died, my mother moved in with us. Maria's father worked as an accountant at the Voenstroy Military Construction Company. Sophia studied at the Odessa Communications Institute by correspondence and worked as a radio operator at the Giprosviaz Institute. Her husband, Pavel Svirgunenko, a Ukrainian, worked in the Radio Security Department of the NKVD. Their son was born before the war. At the beginning of the war the family evacuated to Kuibyshev. Sophia worked as an accountant at the post office and Naum worked as an accountant in a company. Sophia's son fell ill and died in the evacuation. In 1944 they returned to Kiev. Pavel was a higher official in the NKVD. Maria took a preparatory course at the Institute of Civil Engineers and after finishing it became a student at the Institute. In 1949 she graduated from the Sanitary Engineering Faculty of the Engineering Construction Institute and received a job assignment at the construction site of the Volga-Don Channel. She had to work with prisoners there. Upon completion of the construction she was transferred to the construction site of the Stalingrad power plant. She was an engineer in the Operations Department of the Sanitary Engineering Headquarters. Some time in 1955 Sophia quit her job to look after her mother who got sick. Maria also managed to quit work. She returned to Kiev and was hired as an engineer in the Sanitary Engineering Department at the Giprograd Institute. She developed designs for apartment buildings. In 1963 Maria was transferred to the Regional Housing Design Institute where she worked until she retired in 1983. She worked as senior engineer, chief engineer and chief specialist at the Institute. In 1987 she had a myocardial infarction and had to go to the hospital every 4-5 months afterwards. Maria died in the hospital in July 2000.