Lubov Rozenfeld’s mother Sophia Rozenstein and father Mikhail Rozenfeld

My mother Sophia Rozenstein and father Mikhail Rozenfeld, wedding photo. Signed on the backside in my mother's handwriting: '18/VI - 1935. S. Rozenstein marries M.P. Rozenfeldà'. Kiev, 1935.

My mother Sophia Rozenstein began to work at an early age selling oil and sunflower seeds in Kiev. During the Civil war my mother lived through several pogroms in Skvira. During pogroms Jewish families found shelter in the judge's home whose name I don't remember, regretfully. During one pogrom my mother didn't want to go to the judge's home and dragged Yuliy to a frozen swamp where they lay on the ice all night through. The pogrom makers didn't come to the swamp. Bela and Dosia hid in their neighbor's home. After the pogrom the family returned to their plundered home, but they all survived. My mother told me that armed villagers were opposing to pogrom makers. At 14 my mother went to work as a courier at the sugar supply office in Kiev. She attended an amateur performers' club. She told me they studied singing, dancing, dressing and washing there. They staged play and had lots of fun. My mother used to say: 'Who would have I become if it hadn't been for the revolution? would have sold things at the market in the sticks'. My mother had a strong voice. She went to study singing at a music school and later - at the College of music and Drama. After finishing this college my mother went to work as chief editor of music radio programs at the radio committee where she met my future father Mikhail Rozenfeld. They registered their marriage at a registry office in 1935. They were atheists and didn't have a Jewish wedding. My mother didn't want to change her surname from Rozenstein to Rozenfeld: 'Why trade bad for worse?' My father felt hurt…My father learned the profession of a mechanic and supported the family working. He was very talented: besides working as a mechanic he wrote for a radio agency and later worked for the RATAU [Radiotelegraph agency of Ukraine], as a censor in the Department for Literature.

In 1936 their son Alexandr Rozenfeld was born. My mother was chief editor of music radio programs at the radio committee. She spent a lot of time at work and Alexandr was raised by nanny Frosia Kostyuk, a Ukrainian woman. She loved him very much. Frosia lost her children during famine in 1933, and was very attached to our family. I was born on 17 December 1938 in Kiev. We lived in Bratskaya Street in Podol: my mother, father, my brother Alexandr, I and Frosia in one room with the windows facing the Dnieper. I remember that we had a tiled stove and my father stoked it with wood.