Yelizaveta Zatkovetskaya with her grandfather Benyum Zatkovetskiy and cousins

This photograph was made in Kirovograd during my my visiting my aunt Manya in 1936. My grandfather Benyum came from Sagaydak to see me. My grandfather Benyum Zatkovetskiy is in the center. On the left is Clara Schwartzman, my aunt Manya's daughter and I, Yelizaveta Zatkovetskaya, am behind her, my grandfather is holding his grandgrandson Lenia, my uncle Motia’s grandson, on the right my uncle Berl Zatkovetskiy’s adopted son.

My father's parents lived in Sagaydak, a Jewish colony in Nikolaev region. It was a small colony: there were 2 or 3 streets in the settlement. (Editor's note: according to the census of 1897, the population of Sagaydak constituted 770 residents and 760 were Jews). The Jews dealt in farming in the colony. It was a green town and there were gardens and vegetable gardens near each house. Villagers lived in plain clay houses with ground floors and thatched roofs. My grandfather and grandmother Etah were born in Sagaydak some time in the 1860s. My grandfather was a farmer and my grandmother was a housewife taking care of the house, the garden and raising seven children. Our family was very religious.

My father's sister Manya. Born in 1898, was an elementary school teacher. Her husband Abram Schwartzman was a musician. Before the revolution he played at weddings with his orchestra and after the revolution he worked at the philharmonic. They lived in Kirovograd. Manya and Abram had one daughter whose name was Clara. She finished a Medical College after the war. She lives in Odessa now. Manya and Abram died during the evacuation.

My father's youngest sister Yelizaveta, born in 1902, didn't get a higher education. She married Yontl Paikin, a Jewish man from the Jewish colony of Romanovka. She and her husband worked in a Jewish kolkhoz. During the Great Patriotic War Yelizaveta, her husband and their son Mikhail were in the evacuation, and stayed in the Ural after the war. Yelizaveta died in the middle 1980s. Mikhail lives in Israel now.