The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - стр. 19
Another ten years passed and Galina, the eldest of the three, thru a postal acquaintance met Nikolai Ogoltsoff, a petty officer in the Order of Combat Red Banner Black Sea Fleet. “Postal acquaintance” meant the postman delivering a letter which starts, “Hello, unknown Galina…”, and concluded by, ”…Send me your photo, please!”
So, on his next year furlough Nikolai, instead of customary visiting his native Ryazan Region in Russia, arrived in the Ukrainian city of Konotop where the width of both his bottom-bell Navy pants and his chest in the deep V-cut demonstrating the striped vest, and the golden-lettered legend “The Black Sea Fleet” above his forehead in the ribbon around his marine uniform visor-less cap whose 2 black tails ended with imprints (also golden) of anchors (one per a tail) hanging loosely from the back of his head, and one more shining anchor (this time of brass) in his polished belt plate impressed the quiet lanes in the town outskirts where he’d been sending his letters in envelopes embellished on behind with the line of his own design, “Fly with my greetings, come back with the promise of meetings!.”
And three days later my parents, forgetful in the rush to notify my grandmother, registered their marriage in the Konotop ZAGS…
(…did Regional Trade Auditor Vakimov set up innocent people after his arrest?
Affirmative. The show had to go on. So you signed anything they put before you of your good will or you signed it as a cripple if not killed by the tortures and beating under the name of interrogation.
Did he collaborate with the Nazi occupants?
Knowledge of the language would give him such an opportunity but then you should suppose he did it gratis, without bettering his housing conditions or procuring a new pair of shoes for his wife. The bicycle also a telling clue—Germans, still having more than a year of war on their hands, could find room for an able-bodied collaborationist in the bed of a truck heading westward… Seems like he was dead scared at the prospect of another round of interrogations when riding his bike—trying to cross in a bath-tub the wuthering ocean of War.
Was my missing grandpa Joseph a Jew?.
Being a commissar in the years of the Civil War, proficiency with the language in question, why, the name itself might serve a bunch of circumstantial evidence for the assumption. However, the high percentage of the chosen people’s offspring among the revolutionary leaders of the period does not remove the possibility of exceptions. The language could have been picked up while being an errand-boy and/or shop assistant at a store of some Jew merchant. As for the name, let's not forget that even such a hardened anti-Semite as Comrade Stalin was his namesake… Still and all, my mother, when introducing herself, preferred to change her patronymic, taking root from an Old Testament handsome character, into its Russianized rustic form: “Osipovna”…)
Her dark mellow eyes Galina inherited from Katerinna Ivanovna (or Katarzyna Janovna?) whose affinity with the tribes of Israel seems doubtful enough.
Firstly, in the red corner of her kitchen there hung a dark lacquered board with some glum-bearded saint (I can’t say of which religion or nationality, could be a Catholic as well). Besides, she fattened a pig in her shed, Masha was her name, for slaughter.