Sonia Roshanskaya

This is my mother's older sister Sonia Roshanskaya, nee Korsunskaya. The photo was taken in Voznesensk in the 1910s after her finishing a grammar school there. Sonia was born in 1897. As a child she was smart and had an inquiring mind. She studied well, but was a naughty girl. My mother told me a story: during the Civil War some bandits were staying in my grandfather's home. There was a redhead among them who had a remarkable appetite. When their senior ordered Grandmother Leya to make vareniki [dumplings with filling] Sonia made a big varenik filling it with wheat wastes and put it on top of others on a dish hoping that the redhead would grab it. He did and got very angry when he found out that there was something wrong with the filling. Grandmother Leya was horrified, but Sonia just burst into laughter. All of a sudden other bandits began laughing, too, and the redhead laughed with them. Sonia got married in the early 1920s. I think her husband's surname was Katel. Sonia's son Abram was born in 1923, and in 1924 Sonia moved to her older brother Godia in Australia. I don't know what happened to her first husband. In Australia Sonia married Yakov Roshanski, a Jewish man who came from Bessarabia. They had two sons: Harry and Tony, and two daughters: Rachel and Liya. Liya was named after her grandmother. I saw my aunt Sonia in 1976 for the first time when she came to Kishinev on a visit with her husband. Sonia was a slim woman who looked young for her age. She died in Perth in 1989.