This is my twin brother Solomon Gutman. We used to call him Salya. The photo was taken in Riga in the 1970s.
My twin brother was absolutely different from me. But somehow we always had similar ideas. He was taller than me. In the beginning he was frantically religious, but when we both changed our views in Pavlovski Posad and Dvinsk, he became an outermost left-winger. He was politically more to the left than me, but he was never touched by the police. I was a less active Komsomol member and still I managed to serve several terms in prison somehow. He was severe, strict, and very erudite. In his apartment there were a lot of books. He was very interested in politics. His appearance was unlike mine.
After the war he came to Riga and worked in the advertising department of a film company, made large posters for cinema, and worked in the Lachplesis cinema. He worked there for a long time and had a good reputation. He didn't like melodramas, broken hearts and things. For example, he was contemptuous of the film by Sergei Bondarchuk, 'Fate of a Man'. Emotional break-down! Fie! He didn't care much about himself, but he was very devoted to children!
My brother got married even earlier than I. He was a good artist. Our father could only play the accordion and our mother could sew. There wasn't anything artistic in their characters. Salya's son, Naftoly Gutman, is also an artist, an old man by now, too. And Naftoly's son is an artist as well. Salya's daughter chose a musical career, although she was reluctant to study music as a girl and her parents had to push her. Anyway, she has become a good musician. She's a teacher in a music school. She has left for Germany with her second husband and children. My brother died a few years ago, of pancreas disease. His widow lives in Germany now. The eldest son of my brother, Sergei, was kind of a ne'er-do-well fellow. They found a job for him, in a commodity railway terminal, but he was squeezed to death between carriages there. He was only eighteen.
