MOISEY
FIDELMAN

Later in 1959, Moisey and his family moved to an apartment in Northern Izmailovo District, at Shchelkovsky proezd, 15-2, apartment 46. Before that, they lived for almost 20 years on Taganskaya Street with Tatiana’s relatives in two rooms of a communal apartment (besides Moisey and Tatiana, and their children, together with them lived Tatiana's parents and families of two Tatiana's brothers, and the family of Tatiana's uncle).

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Much related to Taganskaya Street. The years of the war, and the events of the late 40s, when Moisey was suddenly deprived his PhD title and it was not clear how antisemitic campaign would end (it ended with the death of Stalin). The “exile” to the collective farm in the mid-50s. But there were also joyful events, the children of Moisey were born there – daughter Natalia and son Sergei. The children spent their childhood there, there they went to school. Natalia almost even finished it, school number 473, while Sergei had just started it (4).

 

Their communal apartment was located on the ground floor (5). In the room where they lived, there was a piano, and daughter Natalia played on it. Returning from the collective farm, Moisey got a TV, and the whole family was gathering to watch it. Also, Moisey had binoculars from the war (6).

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For the summer holidays, they always went out of town, to the village where Tatiana's parents come from. The relatives still lived there, and Tatiana’s mother rented a house there for the summer break. Moisey was taking a car (hardly for rent, the first car rental in Moscow really opened in 1956 (7), and there were mostly Soviet models, but Moisey was getting a Czechoslovakian Skoda station wagon from somewhere, probably from his work) and the whole family was going to the dacha.

 

Dacha is one of the fundamental cultural concepts of the Soviet Union. A dacha is a country house that is owned or rented out for the summer. In both cases it is used for summer holidays. Usually, the dacha is located at 100-200 km from the city or closer (by USSR standards this is a short distance). Grandparents and children spend the whole summer at the dacha (school holidays in the USSR and now in Russia last exactly three months, from June 1 to September 1). The dacha has its own vegetable garden which was a very important additional supply of the food for the family.

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Of all the relatives who lived on Taganskaya Street, Moisey and Tatiana were the first to move to a separate apartment, which they received in a new apartment building. The entire area where they moved, Northern Izmailovo, was recently built in an open field: Moscow was expanding. In the 50s, with the intensification of the construction of new housing, resettlement from communal apartments began (which was completed by the beginning of the 90s). Cities (including Moscow) grew rapidly, and families moved from old houses in the city center to new buildings on the periphery. There were new five-story buildings, unofficially called "Khrushchevki". This was exactly the apartment where my grandfather and grandmother still lived in the 1980s when I was visiting them in my childhood.

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Tatiana's father, Nikolai, died in 1952, in September (8). Moisey and Tatiana took Tatiana's mother, Matryona, to live with them and their children in a new apartment.