Categories: Family, Lev Shlyakhter

My mother was a woman from Kirovsk, Vyatsk. She worked as a typewriter; she talked on the phone and so on. That’s that.

And what was your sister’s name?

Mine? I don’t have a sister. I have a brother, his name was Vladislav. He is dead too. He died in 1982.

Was he elder than you?

He was younger.

And you stayed together with your mother.

Yes.

And was your mother a Russian too?

My mother was a Russian too. That is a very horrible but interesting story. Besides, we had a son. He was elder than me, she had a son. My father’s first wife was a Jewess. I don’t know why they estranged, that was his secret, my father’s secret, he never told me about it. So they separated, I was given to my father when I was small. And she, his wife, went to Finland with him. I know only that his name was Henrykh. And I don’t know anything more. He asked his brother who lived in Leningrad to learn if there was such a person, because he disappeared. There were lots of people with the surname Shlyakhter. And couldn’t find any ends. So this is my second mother. I consider that … I know who gave birth to me. But she is my second mother. She raised me, she…, when I got fatherless I lived with her.

Did you feel the difference?

No, I didn’t feel the difference. And she loved me somehow. My father loved me less. I know why, in childhood… He engaged a younger son. Because he looked like a Jew more, and I looked like a Russian. Although I am a copy of my father.

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Researcher: Natalja Ivashchanka, Sviatlana Silava, Yanka Kupala State University of Grodno