This is my mother Mina Landsman. The picture was taken shortly before I was born. The picture was taken in Nizhniy Novgorod in 1925.
My mother finished six grades of the Jewish school. She worked in a pharmacy before getting married. She weighed the components of the medicine.
My father met his future wife in Nizhniy Novgorod. My mother told me the story of how they met. The central street in Nizhniy Novgorod was called Bolshaya Pokrovskaya; it has the same name now.
In the evenings and during the weekends young people used to saunter in the street, sing songs and eat ice-cream. My father was with his friends and my mother was with hers.
Somebody broached the conversation and they got acquainted. In 1920 they got married. My mother quit her job after getting married.
I think my parents had a traditional Jewish wedding as my grandparents would have objected to a non-Jewish one as they were very religious.
My parents didn't have their own house. They got very lucky - they moved into the apartment with the Lubotskiy sisters. They said they didn't mind us moving into their apartment.
I was born on 14th April 1924 in Nizhniy Novgorod. My parents called me Adolf. I don't have a Jewish name. My father still worked in his shop with his brother Pavel.
My mother was a housewife and took care of me. We were pretty well-off during the NEP times, and the Soviet regime encouraged entrepreneurship.
I hardly remember anything about my life in Nizhniy Novgorod. We left for Moscow in 1928.
