Ronia Finkelshtein's aunt Sonia Rabichkina with her son Boris Rabichkin

My mother's sister Sonia Rabichkina [nee Izrailevich] and her son Boris. The photo was taken in Kolomak in 1917 to send it to relatives. Sonia married an accountant, Michael Rabichkin, a Jewish man. He worked at the sugar factory in Kolomak near Kharkov. Aunt Sonia moved to Kolomak. Their son, Boris, was born in 1914. Shortly after the revolution the Rabichkin family moved to Kharkov. Boris studied at the Jewish school. He spoke Yiddish fluently and even read Hugo in Hebrew. [Editor's note: Victor Hugo, French poet and novelist.] After school he couldn't enter a [higher educational] institute, as new Soviet laws only allowed young people from working families to study in higher educational institutions. He finished an industrial school and became a worker at the Locomotive Repair Plant in Kharkov. Later he became a correspondent for the plant newspaper. He got married and had a son, Erik. His marriage didn't last long - they divorced. Boris entered the Faculty of Literature at the Pedagogical Institute in Kharkov. He married a Jewish woman, Fania Shtitelman.Their son, Sima, was born in the late 1930s. After the war Boris and Fania worked at the Institute of Archaeology in Kiev. Boris had finished the Faculty of Literature at the Pedagogical Institute, but he specialized in archaeology and had inventions in that field. In the early 1960s the Institute of Archaeology sent him to a reserve in Olvia [400 km from Kiev] where he was the director for two years. Boris was successful with his work in archaeology. He also wrote poems and short stories, but he wasn't ambitious and didn't publish his writings. Fania was very smart. She was the manager of the antique section of the Museum of Western and Oriental Art in Kiev in the 1970s. I liked to visit her at home. She always had gatherings of interesting people: archaeologists, historians, poets and writers. Her friends became my friends.