This snapshot was done in 1958 in Leningrad. We are sitting on a sofa in our flat. I have lived with Katya happily and in love for 28 years.
I got acquainted with my second wife Ekaterina in Urzhum. My institute was located there. I named her tenderly Katyusha. We loved each other very much. As I already said, I had not any connections with my first wife since November, 1941. My wife was born in Ryazan, she was Russian.
When she finished institute in 1943, it was Moscow Institute of Technology of Light Industry named after Koganovich [the leader of Communist Party], she arrived in Leningrad, where I already worked. When we started to live together, we had no flat of our own, so we lived with my parents for some time. Ekaterina became my wife from the very beginning of 1943, and our son Boris was born on December 1, 1943. I was summoned to Moscow from Urzhum to write the diploma, and I left.
A bit later my wife joined me there. In 1-2 months I saw that she was going to give birth to a baby soon and I sent her to Ryazan, where all her relatives lived, because we lived in a student's hostel, in a separate room. The labors began in the railway car, so she was at once sent to a hospital after arrival, and she gave birth to our son Boris.
She was a very capable person. She heard that I spoke Yiddish with parents and wanted to master this language. Literally in 2-3 months of our joint life she learned the colloquial Yiddish. Much later, already after the war, there was one interesting episode. We came to the synagogue to meet father from some prayer or fast and take him home, and in the side wing there was a crowd of women and men who had not found seats.
And my wife is a typical beautiful Russian woman. And two Jewish ladies began talking in Yiddish that there was this Russian woman standing there for some reason and my wife overheard it, turned to them and said in Hebrew: "My husband is Jewish, here he is, standing beside me". Certainly, my parents grew fond of her at once and she mastered Yiddish fast, being very talented. We loved each other all our lives, in spite of me being very jealous. Men admired her, and we had short quarrels for this reason.
