Dinora Gdalievna Dombrovskaya

This is my grandmother Dinora Gdalievna Dombrovskaya. The photo was presumably taken in the 1900s in Tomsk, after she finished the grammar school. She was a girl of strict rules, and dressed accordingly. The high neckline in this picture testifies to this. Aspiring to find her own road in life, she moved from Tomsk to St. Petersburg, where she entered and successfully graduated from the Medical Institute.

My paternal grandmother, Dinora Gdalievna Dombrovskaya, was born in Tomsk in Siberia in 1885, and died around 1960. She kept her maiden name after marriage. She came from a large family, she had many brothers. I don’t remember their names. After finishing grammar school at the age of 18, she entered the St. Petersburg Medical Institute and became a dentist. She had dentist’s equipment installed in her apartment, and she received patients there. Dinora was a girl of strict rules: a student, who wanted to find her own path. In 1917, when the revolution broke out, she got married and lived with her husband, my grandfather Leib Borisovich Zilber, in Tavricheskaya Street in Leningrad.