Mina and Isaac Landsman with their friends and relatives

This photo was taken during a picnic. From left to right: first row: my mother Mina Landsman is in the center, my aunt Etya Landsman, the wife of father's brother Pavel, is to the right.
The second row : father's brother Pavel is the first to the left, my father Isaac Landsman is the first to the right.
The rest are my parent's friends. I don't remember their names. The picture was taken in the village of Ksetovo (a suburb of Nizhniy Novgorod ) in 1924.

I don't know much about my father's family. There were three sons in the family. All of them were born in Liozno.
My father's older brother, Morduhai, was born in 1887, my father was born in 1893, and the youngest brother Pavel, Jewish name Pinhas, was born in 1895.
My father never told me about his childhood and adolescence. His family spoke Yiddish. I think my father's family was religious. It couldn't have been different at that time, especially in hick towns.
My father and his brothers moved to Nizhniy Novgorod before World War I. It was a big city, but it was included in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, and Jews were permitted to live there.

After moving to Nizhniy Novgorod, my father's eldest brother, Morduhai, learned the craft of glass-blowing. My father and his younger brother rented the premises for the shop and sold secondhand men's suits.
Pavel was married to Etya Spungina. They had two children - a daughter, Sofia, born in 1918, and a son, Arkadiy, born in 1923.

My father met his future wife in Nizhniy Novgorod. My mother told me the story of how they met. The central street in Nizhniy Novgorod was called Bolshaya Pokrovskaya; it has the same name now.
In the evenings and during the weekends young people used to saunter in the street, sing songs and eat ice-cream. My father was with his friends and my mother was with hers.
Somebody broached the conversation and they got acquainted. In 1920 they got married.

I was born on 14th April 1924 in Nizhniy Novgorod. My parents called me Adolf. I don't have a Jewish name. My father still worked in his shop with his brother Pavel.
My mother was a housewife and took care of me. We were pretty well-off during the NEP times, and the Soviet regime encouraged entrepreneurship.