Grandma, part 3

After the war Lyuba and Mulya returned to Leningrad, along with little Rimma and the rest of the family, except of course the ones who were killed in action, in Holocaust or in Gulag. But more about those later. Mulya went back to his work as an engineer, and Lyuba started working in a sailor clinic. She worked there for the next 50 years or so, eventually becoming the chief of internal medicine there, and that was about it for her career. There was a lot more to her job than career, though: she liked working with people, she liked her coworkers and her patients well, and they liked her too. A lot of her social life was there. And there were material rewards, too: sailors whose ships visited foreign ports were fairly rich in Russia, and tended to bring exotic stuff from abroad. One more little detail of her career: the powers that be once wanted to give a medal to some "work hero" and asked the clinic to recommend one. The clinic recommended my grandma, to which the powers that be responded "for goodness' sake, not one with a name like *that*!". And so my grandma was left without a medal

After the life got back to fairly normal, at least as much as it could be in Stalin's Soviet Union, Lyuba and Mulya had a little boy whom they named Iosif (Osya). Soon thereafter Stalin decided that it was a good idea to send all Jews to Siberia, which was not particularly unusual since he had a lot of experience sending various ethnic minorities in their entirety over there. This time he wasn't very fast, first starting a media campaign against "cosmopolites" and then against Jewish doctors. Lyuba did not much appreciate patients who were asking her not to poison them, and feared things would get worse. They would've, too, but then Stalin decided to start the killing with his own doctors, and therefore promptly kicked the bucket without medical help but with a little help from uncle Darwin.

With Stalin dead everything got better all over the country, which is no surprise. The life went on. Rimma grew up, became a chemical engineer, got married and moved out. Lyuba, Mulya and Osya stayed. Other family members occasionally living with them were Osya's elderly nanny and a cat that terrorized Luyba by trying to bestow dead mice on her. Every time the cat brought her beloved mistress a dead mouse, Lyuba perfomed a very athletic hop onto the table and stood there screaming until one of the men confiscated the dead mouse and flushed it down the toilet.

In 1967 Mulya died. I never got to meet him. Neither did my mother, I think.