Olga Kulina with Alexandra Kulina

This is the new generation in our family: granddaughter Alexandra, born in 1996.

The picture was taken at the summer house near St.Petersburg in 2002, when she was 6 years old and attended a Jewish kindergarten. In 2003 she went school.

Olga is my younger daughter from my second marriage. My first husband, Ismail Farka, was Albanian. I went after him to Albania after we married and our daughter Lilyana, Olga’s elder sister, was born in 1956.

However, soon the relationship between Albania and the USSR became complicated and developed into a critical conflict. In 1961 me and Lilyana had to leave for the USSR.

After the relationships between the USSR and Albania were broken, there was no telephone or post connection between the countries, and during a number of decades Ismail and I knew nothing about each other!

In 1969 I got married for the second time. My second husband is a Jew, his name is Izyaslav Kerzhner. He was born in Dnepropetrovsk in 1936 and got a Jewish name by birth - Yeguda (Euda in Russian). A child with such a name could not have lived in Russia, he would have been tormented.

So later parents changed his name to a Russian one, Izyaslav. His parents were office-workers, they were non-religious people and their income was pretty average.

As a schoolboy Izyaslav was already keen on biology and composed collections of insects. But in the 1950s state anti-semitism in the Ukraine was the strongest in the USSR, and for this reason he was able to enter the biological faculty of a university only in the neighboring republic of Moldova, in Kishinev [capital of Moldova, former Soviet republic].

Later on, when the department of entomology was liquidated in that university, he moved to the biological faculty of Leningrad State University with great difficulties, as he had to pass extra exams, and then he graduated from State University successfully.

We first met in a group of friends. He was divorced and had no children from his previous marriage. Soon we got married and in 1974 our daughter Olga was born.

My younger daughter Olga graduated from the Electrical Engineering University (former LETI), where I tried to enter once unsuccessfully. She met her husband-to-be there and married him.

In 1996 their daughter Alexandra was born, my granddaughter. She attends a Jewish kindergarten. Olga worked in that kindergarten as a cook, when she studied at the University. Olga's husband is Russian, Alexey Kulin.

We have very good relations with him and his parents. However, his relatives, especially the grandmother of my son-in-law, expressed certain discontent with the fact that Sasha attends a Jewish kindergarten.

My son-in-law is an expert on computer technologies. He works as a manager in a large company. They live separately from us.