Naomi Deich's paternal grandparents Liver Zlochevskiy and Brukha Zlochevskaya and her cousin Ida Mezhyborskaya

My grandfather Liver Zlochevskiy, my grandmother Brukha Zlochevskaya and their granddaughter Ida Mezhyborskaya, the child of my mother's sister Babl. The photo was taken on the occasion of Ida's 18th birthday in Rostov in the late 1930s. All I know about my grandparents is that they lived in Cherkassy before the Revolution of 1917. Cherkassy was a fairly big town in Kiev province; nowadays it's a regional center. Its population was about 300,000 at the end of the 19th century. Over 30,000 of them were Jews. The town also had Russian and Ukrainian inhabitants. The Jews were craftsmen and merchants. There were several synagogues, yeshivot, trade schools and stores in the Jewish neighborhoods of the town. There were no conflicts between the people of different nationalities. My mother's father was a timber merchant. In the early 1920s the family moved to Rostov in Russia, escaping from the numerous pogroms. They had a distant relative in Rostov. I only saw my mother's parents once in my life when my mother and I went to visit them in Rostov in 1928. They lived in a big well-furnished house. They were a wealthy family. My grandfather made a very pleasant impression. He wore plain clean clothes. He didn't wear a hat. My mother told me that my grandfather was moderately religious. He went to the synagogue on holidays and celebrated Sabbath and Jewish holidays. I remember a funny incident. My grandfather drank a shot of vodka at dinner. I saw how much he enjoyed it and asked for one for myself. My mother just looked at me astonished, but my grandfather dipped a piece of bread into vodka and gave it to me. I tried it, but spit it out immediately. I thought that nothing in the world tasted worse than vodka. My grandfather burst out laughing. My grandmother seemed taciturn and hardworking to me. She wore clean clothes; that's all I remember. My mother's parents perished in Rostov when the Germans occupied the town in 1941. They ordered all Jewish people to come to the Mievskaya Balka at the outskirts of the town. [Mievskaya Balka is the mass gravesite of Jews killed in the Nazi invasion of the town.] They exterminated all Jews of the town within a few days by shooting them and throwing the dead bodies into a ravine. My mother's older sister, Babl Mezhyborskaya, nee Zlochevskaya, was born in the late 1890s. She studied at the Russian grammar school in Cherkassy. She spoke Yiddish and Russian. She was a housewife. She was shot by the Germans in Rostov along with her daughter Ida and her 4-year-old son.