Faina Khorunzhenko with her father Lev Levinson and mother Olga Levinson

This is I with my father and mother. The photo was taken in Novoukrainka in 1924. I was four years old. My mother was born on 12th December 1900. Her name was Olga Zamb. After the death of my grandfather, my mother's older brother Grisha (who fought in World War I and was demobilized in 1916 due to a wound, after which he found a job in Pervomaisk) took my mother into his own family. But my mother did not like it there because Grisha's wife Asya had no love for her. Then the husband of her sister Sonya, Bentsion Brodsky, took her to Novoukrainka, where she lived from 1916. It was there that she met my father. My father, Lev Levinson, was five years older then my mother. He was born in Novoukrainka in 1885. He graduated from the College of Commerce. He courted her for a very long time - more than a year and a half. They married and lived with grandfather, and then I was born on 1st May 1920. We had no house of our own, so we rented houses. I remember our last flat: it was big, with three rooms and two kitchens - a warm one and a summer one; there was a dining room, my parents' bedroom, my grandfather's room, and the smallest room for me. My father worked as an economist in the system of central work cooperatives. Our financial situation was not bad: there were no super incomes, but it was enough for us to live on. I had a good fur-coat for winter, and many different dresses - woolen and velvet. My mother also had very good clothes, and my father was even called a dandy. He was very elegant. Back then people bought everything in private stores. It was the New Economic Policy. Lenin introduced it after 1921. Private capital was allowed in commerce and light industry but not in heavy industry. My mother didn't work anywhere; she was a housewife. In the morning she made breakfast for my father and saw him to the door; then after feeding my grandfather and me, she took me for a walk or shopping. We had no servants, so she did all the housework herself.