This is my mother Esther photographed on the occasion of her 20th birthday in 1908. Glotser photo shop in the Faltzfein house in Potyomkinskaya Street, Kherson.
My mother Esther was born in 1888. She received an elementary Jewish education. She studied 4 years in a Jewish school. My mother could read and write in Yiddish, knew prayers in Hebrew and could read the Torah a little. She told me that grandfather Leizer taught her Hebrew and prayers. My mother was a sickly child and her parents didn't train her in any crafts. She was helping my grandmother about the house. My parents got married in 1910. I often look at their wedding photograph made in one of best photo shops in Kherson. They are wearing rich fancy clothes. They had a traditional Jewish wedding according to all rules: they stood under the chuppah in the biggest and most beautiful synagogue of the town.
After the wedding my parents rented an apartment in a house in Spartakovskaya Street near the market in the center of the town. In 1911 my mother gave birth to twins, but they died in infancy. My mother didn't have children for few years. She fell ill with tuberculosis. At that time WWI began. Fortunately, my father had a 'white card' [Editor's note: this was a release from service in the tsarist army before the revolution of 1917 issued by a medical commission that determined whether a young man was fit for military service], due to his poor sight. However, this didn't prevent him from working from dawn till night: my mother needed lots of medications and my father had to earn well to pay for them. Since my father made clothes for the town leadership, he managed to have my mother taken to a good hospital and she had all necessary medications that enabled her to set on her way to recovery.
