I, Maya Pivovar. This photo was taken on my 70th birthday. I like to get together to sing and joke. It's a pity, there are not so many occasions for this. Kiev, 1997
I got married at the age of 59. My husband Yefim Karpinskiy, a Jew, was born in 1916. Before retirement he worked in the Institute of Electric Circuits. He was chief specialist in power supply network in the town. Yefim became a widower few years before we met. We had no wedding party, we just decided to register our marriage in a registry office and began to live in my apartment, in perfect harmony, and we never said a rude word to one another. I hardly knew anything about my husband's family. We lived together for too little time, only a year and a half. He died from stroke in 1988. didn't remarry for two years, but I had a very good husband and I liked being married. I talked to my friend. Her husband had many friends. I said to her: 'Perhaps, there is some product in no demand around?' (laughs). The wife of my current husband, a Jew, Yefim Volodarskiy, had died. My friends introduced us to one another. She is now in Germany. When she writes me, she always reminds us who we owe for our happiness. I liked Yefim. He was a very sensible and educated man. He had worked as leading engineer at different plants. By the time we met, he was a pensioner. We had a lot of free time and we walked and went to theaters. We lived together for three years before we decided to get married. Thank God, we've been together for ten years already. We live in harmony and even merrily.
Yefim has a wonderful sense of humor, he has a joke for each unpleasant event in life and then we stop brooding and begin to laugh. This helps very well in life. I wasn't good at cooking before, but now I can cook gefilte fish and sweet and sour meat. It is for my husband. I try to cook something of Jewish cuisine every Friday. We don't observe any other traditions. Every week my husband's younger son Alexandr and his family visit us. They live nearby. My husband and I worry about them when they have problems and try to help, and share their joy when they tell us about their successes. We used to have guests go went out to see my husband's colleagues and my colleagues. We got together on Soviet holidays, New Year and birthdays, but for the recent six years our life has quieted. We and our friends have grown older. My husband and I hardly go out, but we stroll around the house every day. We rarely read fiction. Yefim occasionally quotes a poem in Yiddish, he know Jewish literature wonderfully. We mainly read Ukrainian newspapers, like to watch news on TV and discuss this for sure. We occasionally play cards. I've never been abroad or considered emigration, and I would like to visit far away countries, but we cannot afford it. There is much interesting on TV, so we watch it. I wouldn't want to depart for good. However bad it may be here, but it's best at home.
