This is me and my daughters Maya and Katya Eidlin, photographed in 1949 in Gayvoron after the divorce from my husband.
I married a Ukrainian, Kuzma Yefremovich Zelinsky in 1938.
He was born in 1911 in the village of Salkovo in Gayvoronsky district. It is a Russian territory. I worked in Gayvoron at that time.
After the war, when the Party Schools were first organized, I sent him to study to Odessa in a Party School and he became a party supervisor. I started to work for a newspaper.
In 1947 our second daughter Yekaterina, or Katya, was born. Kuzma never came back to me from Odessa. There was a trial and my friends persuaded me not to divorce my husband. So we remained non-divorced.
He didn't want to live with me because he'd found a new wife. I knew about his life, and he about my life. He assisted our daughters, paid the alimony until Katya came of age.
He died in Odessa in 1970. My husband didn't have any problems about me being a Jewess. He simply fell out of love with me and abandoned me with two children.
Maya graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Mines as an electrician, mechanical engineer. After graduation she worked at the Graphite Combine.
Maya had a fiancé, his name was Lyonya Weissman. His mother was Russian and his father was a Jew. They planned to get married. She wanted to stay in the city, but his parents worked somewhere in the North.
His mother arrived and she didn't like my daughter at all. After that Maya never got married.
My younger daughter Katya finished a secondary school in Gayvoron and went to work in Kirovograd. She worked as a laborer in a vinegar shop at the foodstuffs plant.
Later she was appointed foreman. She got married in 1976. Her husband was a Ukrainian. His name was Pyotr. He still calls me mother. He now lives near Kiev.
He was a musician in the army. She worked at the plant at that time and was on duty 24 hours every day.
