Before the war, Leib Taitz was arrested for being a Bolshevik, and during his imprisonment, he met his future wife, Mary. She was one of eight children, spoke Russian, Yiddish, Latvian and Latgalian. And after the Bolsheviks’ rise to power, Leib was freed, so Mary and he lived together in the town of Zilupe, where Leib was in charge of a mill. Later they moved to Rezekne, where my grandmother Rahil was born. When the war started. Leib Taitz volunteered, and told his family — wife Mary, my Grandma Rahil (she was 4 years old at the time), and her brother Isaac (Izya) (he was 5), to make their way to Leningrad, to his sister Faina (Fanya). They didn’t make it there; they left, as Zilupe was being attacked by Nazis. They walked to the town of Velikiye Luki, and there they boarded the train deeper into the country, evacuated. Leib Taitz died in combat near the town of Naro-Fominsk in March 1942.
A bit about Fanya — she moved to Leningrad in 1917 as a teenage girl, and due to the Revolution, she wasn’t allowed back to Rezekne. She married a man from Harkov named Alexander (Sasha) Vorobeichick. In 1932, they had a daughter, Bronislava (Rolya) Vorobeichik. Fanya worked as a waitress a lot, but professionally, she was an accountant. She left Leningrad during the war and met with my Grandma and her brother in Ufa, while in the evacuation.
After the war, Fanya returned to Leningrad, and my Grandma’s family went back to Zilupe, where Mary would go to a train station every day, hoping to find her relatives. And she did! Her first cousins. One of them, Sonya Gootman, invited them to live with her in the town of Ludza, which they did, and Grandma went to the second grade of her elementary school there.
In 1955, Grandma went to study in Leningrad, and she finally saw Fanya! Grandma lived there with Rebecca Rubina, the sister of Rachel, Leyb’s mother. Rebecca was a librarian and worked in a public library all her life. She even refused to evacuate during the war and lived through the Siege of Leningrad. She died in 1958. Then Fanya invited Grandma to stay with her, up until the end of uni in 1960.
After the university was over, Grandma was sent to teach in Ural, while back at Ludza for a holiday, she met Mark Tseytlin, who was studying medicine in Riga. Mark was from the city of Chernihiv in Ukraine. Shortly after they got married in 1963, Mark was sent to work in Rezekne. She worked as a teacher at a Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Boarding School for fifty years. The couple had two boys, first Anatoly (Tolya) in 1964 and then Alexander (Sasha) in 1969. Mary, my Grandma’s mum, died in 1984, and Fanya died in 1987. She was cremated and her ashes were buried next to her mother’s grave in Rezekne. Her mother, Rachel, wife of Naftoli Taitz, died in 1935, and Fanya wasn’t let out of Leningrad for the funeral due to the Revolution aftermath. Bronislava moved to Israel; she died in 2011 and is buried near Kiryat Ata.
Sasha moved to Moscow, where he met my mother, Maria (Masha) Pivnik, while they both worked\studied medicine, and they got married in 1995. My dad worked as an anesthetist and as an editor of medical literature. He died in July 2013. My mother is a radiotherapist.
Tolya moved to Riga and in the 1990s met Svetlana (Sveta), they got married and had two girls, Mary and Rebecca, then all of them moved to Israel. Tolya was a professional sports trainer; he owned a gym. He had a third daughter, Adelina, with his SO Karen in 2015 (after Sveta and he separated), and died in August 2019. Mary has a son, Leo\Lev; he was born earlier this year.
My mother, Maria, her mother Tatyana, brother Vladimir, and his family live in Moscow. Mary, Rebecca, Adelina, and I all live in Israel.
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