This is my second wife Zina Klinger. This photo was taken in Odessa in 1940.
My second wife Zina was born in Odessa in 1910. She finished a Jewish school and got married at the age of 16. Her husband came from a wealthy family; his father owned a leather-currying factory during the NEP. After their only child died, Zina divorced her husband. He was a drunkard and a womanizer.
In 1934 she married a Jewish widower named Shtein, who had a son named Misha, born in 1928. Her second husband was a logistics manager. I don’t remember where he worked, though. In 1938 their son Alfred was born. During the Great Patriotic War Zina and her children were in evacuation in Tashkent. Her husband perished at the front.
We met each other in Odessa and decided to get married in 1946. My father had no objections to our marriage. He knew Zina very well.
When Zina and I got married I treated Alfred like my own son, although I didn’t formally adopt him. Zina was a housewife. Life was hard after the war. There was not enough food, but we managed. I didn’t earn much. We couldn’t buy any new clothes, but we managed with what we had. My father lived with us.
