Semyon Gun's parents Anatoli and Fira Gun and my mother's adoptive parents Lazar and Risia Alpert

These are my parents Anatoli and Fira Gun and my mother's adoptive parents Lazar and Risia Alpert. Standing: my mother Fira Gun and my father Anatoli Gun. Sitting: Lazar and Risia Alpert. This photo was taken on the day of my parents' wedding in Odessa in 1933. My father Anatoli was born in 1910. He was probably given a different name at birth, but Anatoli is his name written in his passport. Why I think so is because my grandfather Lazar sometimes called my father Tuly at home. [Editor's note: probably Semyon's father's name was Naftula, a Jewish name.] My father went to school in Borshchagovka. He rarely recalled his childhood. He always remembered that he was forced to study a profession of tailor. Most likely, my paternal grandfather Shlyoma taught his sons himself. My father never told me how he happened to move to Odessa in the early 1930s. All I know is that he came to the house of his parents' acquaintances Lazar and Risia Alpert. Their adoptive daughter Fira lived with them. She was my future mother. My mother Fira Shtilman was born in 1912. My mother either didn't remember or didn't want to tell me where she was born or who her parents were or why she became an orphan. We didn't have any information about her childhood. The Alperts adopted her and her sister, but nobody told me how it happened. I am sure that my mother wasn't in an orphanage or we would know about it. My mother studied at school. She could read and write Russian. My mother was a quiet and reserved woman: Shtilman means 'quiet person' in German and it fully corresponded to her personality. In the 1920s my mother was an ardent Komsomol activist, as she told me. In the 1930s my mother worked in joiner's shops in Odessa. My father and mother got married in 1933. They had a civil ceremony. They rented a room in the house where the Alperts lived. In some time my parents received an apartment in a wing house in the yard of this house.