This is me and my wife Zoria Hotinskaya, nee Petrunicheva, on our honeymoon, which we spent in the Caucasus, in Novy Afon where we also loved to spend vacations afterward.
This photo was taken in 1953.
I got married in 1952. I knew my future wife Zoria since childhood. Her parents were old communists and lived in Kiev before the Revolution of 1917.
They worked in a party unit together. They got married at approximately the same time as my parents did. Zoria's mother, Yelizaveta Privarovskaya, was a Jew and her father, Nikolay Petrunichev, was Russian.
Later both families moved to Moscow and continued to be friends. I knew Zoria almost since her birth. She was born in Moscow in 1926.
We often saw each other on holidays, at family gatherings and birthdays. There was an age difference of seven years between us and it was significant before the war.
When I returned home after the war Zoria was a student at the Department of History of Moscow University.
When I studied at the academy, Zoria's mother bought a tour to the Riga seashore for Zoria, her younger brother, my cousin Fira, my aunt Maria's daughter, who also lived in Moscow and studied at university, and me.
That summer Zoria and I realized that we loved each other. After finishing her studies Zoria went to work at the Institute of Oriental Studies.
We got married in 1952. We didn't have a Jewish wedding. Our parents and I were members of the Party. Neither my wife nor I were religious. We registered our marriage in a registry office and in the evening our parents arranged a wedding dinner for us.
Our relatives and friends attended it. Zoria moved in with us. Regretfully, Mama didn't live long enough to see her grandchildren.
She died in 1952, a few months after our wedding.
