Lower row from left to right: my Uncle Alexander Sorkin, mother's brother, my father Yakov Len. Upper row: my mother Tsilya Len. The snapshot was made on the background of the Peterhof Palace and fountains, - that's how they looked like before being destroyed by the Germans during the war.
It was in May 1937, the beginning of summer, everybody is beautifully dressed and in good spirits. This was before my grandfather Abram Sorkin and father's Uncle Khenik Skurnik were arrested, they were put to prison in the end of 1937.
My mother, Tsiva Abramovna Sorkinà, Len after marriage, was born in a small town of Drutsk in Tolochin district in Belorussia in 1912. She went to study in Leningrad approximately in 1930.
She studied in the Institute of Silicate Technologies. Grandma had bought a room for her, it was possible then, because there was a lot of uninhabited living space that year.
Making out her registration documents in the passport bureau, Tsiva met her future spouse Yakov, because, as it turned out, they lived very near from one another. It was in 1933, when father was 23.
My father married my mother in the end of 1934, graduated from the university in June 1941, having received a rare for that time diploma of a physicist.
By that moment he already had 2 children: my sister Polina and me. It looks that they did not receive their parents' consent for marriage at once, because both were students, but obtained it after all.
According to their "Certificate of Shlyuby" (certificate of marriage in Belorussian), it happened in the town of Tolochin in 1934. "Shlyuby" means "love" in Belorussian. I was born in that marriage in 1938 in Leningrad.
