Jourka died tragically. It was a cold day. Jourka was playing in the yard, then went to the house and stood at the stove too close to the fireplace. His shirt caught the fire and he was badly burned. He died after long suffering. Before his death, he told mother, “You’ll go far, far away and I will remain here alone, completely alone.” Mother often told us about it and cried. Jourka was five when he died.

            We moved from Warsaw, but I can’t figure out in which year it was. I remember myself wrapped in a big scarf in mother’s arms. It was dark around and a man put a big pear into my hand. I was probably four years old. But where was my younger sister Sasha and why was I in my mother’s arms? It is possible that I was less than three and Sasha wasn’t born yet. Anyway, I remember that man. When years later I told mother about it, she said that that man had loved her very much and had asked her to leave my father and stay with him in Warsaw, but she hadn’t agreed.

            We moved to Borisov [now Belarus]. I remember when I was 5; we lived in a small dark room. Sasha couldn’t walk for a long time, and she crawled in a funny way: sitting on the floor, she kept her legs in front of her and bended her left leg and then her right. There were only three of us: mother, Sasha and I. I remember neither father, nor anybody else. When mother went out, a funny woman babysat us. She had a scarf on her head wrapped on the top such that that loose ends looked like horns. She sang us a song in Lithuanian: 

Žvirblis nabagėlis
Visas negalėjo,
Galvelę skaudėjo.

 (Poor little sparrow,
He is very ill,
He has a headache.)

Once when we stayed alone, Sasha crawled to the door, moved a bolt and locked the door. When mother returned, she couldn’t get in. She asked us to unlock the door but we couldn’t. Mother had to break a window. Mother went to work. She worked in a liquor store selling vodka. We played with bottles as dolls, we had no true dolls. We pushed bottles along a washboard, which represented stairs. We liked the noise, it was funny. Our bottles represented boys and girls, who visited each other.

            When I was seven, we lived in another place. My mother worked at home. In our house. or apartment, there were several rooms, but I clearly remember only the kitchen with a big stove. Mother worked for a factory that produced matches. She would bring home components to make matchboxes. She had a form, around which she wrapped matchbox sides, on the top she put a bottom, everything had to be covered with glue and then blue paper, and then she put it in the warm stove to dry. At that time Ann and father lived with us. Ann and I helped mother to make matchboxes. I liked it, and I remember even now the smell of wood and glue. And I was proud that I was working. Later on, when we lived in Moscow, my brother Feodor was able to secure a pension for our mother on the grounds that she had worked in that factory.

            I think that the time in Borisov, where she moved from Warsaw, was the hardest for my mother. I remember the miserable apartment where our youngest brother Nicolas was born and died. I remember vividly when he died. One night I heard my mother crying. I got up and went to a small room. Three candles were burning at the little casket in which Nicolas was lying. He was pale, very pale, and mother sat next to him and cried. I wanted to get closer, but I was led away and put to bed. I closed my eyes and saw green branches with green leaves everywhere around, grove from the clothes which hanging around, and the branches trembles and bended, and bended…

            When Nicolas died he was three. He was ill almost all the time and mother said it was from malnutrition. Our poverty killed him.

            Our father was unemployed at that time and mother asked her brother Nick for help. He lived then in Wilno and he arranged for us to come. In Wilno father got a job in the District Inspection Office.

            Later on, when it was time for me to go to school, my sister Kate already had a job in the District Courthouse. She and father worked in the same building.

At that time we lived in our apartment, which was cheap, but big enough so the youngest children – my sister Sasha and I – had our own room. We didn’t like it when in the evening grownups sent us to bed. We wanted to stay. It was more fun to stay up with them.

My mother, Anna Dranicyn, nee Stavrovich (1860-1931), unlike my father, had many relatives. They were scientists, students, local activists and teachers. Their forefathers came from Serbia. They were educators.

My mother’s cousin, the son of her father’s brother, held a high position in the local branch of the Ministry of Education. All his children were able to attend state schools free of charge because of it. His name was Feodor, and one of my brothers was named after him.

            My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a Greek Catholic and worked in the church. Later he became a deacon. But he died early, leaving his wife with four children. My mother, Anna, was the oldest – she was eight at that time – next was Vladimir (our uncle Vlad), then Elena and finally Nicolas. My grandmother’s name was Ludowika, nee Andrzejewska. I was named after her. After her husband died, she also started to work in the church, making communion bread. This was her only source of income. I don’t know how it was possible to live and raise children on this. Only her sons, Vlad and Nick, got a formal education and her daughters, my mother and Elena, were home schooled, learning only some reading and writing, sewing, embroidering, knitting, and cooking. But our mother wasn’t able read at all; she had an eye disease [trichiasis]. In this condition the eyelash hairs grow towards the eyes and she suffered from eye pain. From time to time we, her children, cut her eyelashes with small clippers to ease her pain. I don’t remember her sewing or knitting, but when she was young she did it very well and she taught us to sew, to embroider, and to knit.

Mother kept close relations with her siblings all her life. In hard times they helped her, especially uncle Vlad. When my sister Kate went to school, she lived in his house in Novohopersk [Russia], and when my sister Ann went to school, she also lived in his house at that time in Warsaw [now Poland]. Our uncle Vlad moved around very often. I remember when he worked as railroad conductor and traveled across Siberia [by Transsiberian Railroad]. And then he became a bee keeper and lived in Sverdlovsk [now Yekaterinburg, Russia]. Our grandmother loved uncle Vlad very much and traveled with him. Uncle Vlad had ten sons and one daughter, Vera. Aunt Natasha (his wife) often said in annoyance, “How I hate these trousers!” and locked up in her room with Vera to enjoy a meal. Many of their sons died young. Only three lived to old age. Nicolas, who was my age, was a geologist, lived in Sverdlovsk and died there in the 1960s. Vladimir and Wieceslaw also survived. The last lived in Riga [now Latvia], married a Latvian woman and had a son who became an engineer and lived in Leningrad [now St. Petersburg, Russia], and he is the only Stavrovich descendant alive. Vera had three daughters: one from her first marriage to a military officer and two from her second marriage to a railroad foreman. Her oldest daughter Julia lived in Sloka [now Latvia], and her two other daughters lived in Achinsk [Russia], in Siberia.

            Aunt Elena was younger then uncle Vlad. She married Mr. Wieliczko, a feldscher. They had three children: Olga was the oldest, Nicolas was the middle child, and Lubov was the youngest.

            And finally there was the youngest son of our grandmother, Uncle Nick. Our mother loved him very much. He had three children: Leonida the oldest; Zinaida, the middle child; and Serge, the youngest.

            When my parents were in dire straits, Uncle Nick lived in Wilno. He invited my mother and found a job for my father. My father changed jobs very often because of his pride: he couldn’t bear to be humiliated.

We kept in touch with all mother’s relatives. We got together and sent letters. But now there is only one Stavrovich alive. He is Uncle Vlad’s grandson and my first cousin once removed, but I don’t know him.

            My mother was an orphan, and her mother didn’t love her because she had married my father. I think my grandmother loved only her son Vlad. She traveled with him until her death. She was 96 when she died somewhere in Siberia.

            When I think of my mother, I think that she was the unhappiest person I know. She loved her children and her husband, too, but he didn’t appreciate it. She was unhappy because she bore mostly girls, and a woman’s life was much harder for lack of rights.

            She had ten children, six girls and four boys. Her firstborn son Ivan died, strangled by his umbilical cord, at the hands of an unskilled midwife. Next was Lidia, then Kate, then Feodor. Somebody told mother that she had to name a daughter after her if she wanted to stop giving birth to girls. So the next girl was named Anna. But despite this, another daughter – Elena, who soon died – was born, and then George, the son, then two more girls – I and Alexandra (Sasha) – and the last, Nicolas. I remember Nicolas’s death.

As I mentioned already, I don’t know why father abandoned his medical career and became a forest ranger near Warsaw. He got hound dogs and hunted rabbits. Mother kept a big household with a cow, pigs and poultry. I was not born yet, so this is a story my mother told us. Lidia and Kate were young. Lidia was  seven and Kate was  five. That means it was 1897 or 1898. Once they went for a walk and didn’t come back in the evening and through the night. My mother didn’t sleep that night. Early in the morning she went to Warsaw to her friend Mrs. Walther for help. Mrs. Walther listened to my mother attentively, then took her hand and led her to the bedroom, where two girls were sleeping serenely.

 Lidia told me another story. It was mother’s birthday. Lidia wanted to give her a present, so she picked out all the flowers in the garden and brought them to mother. Mother was furious and punished her. And Lidia remembered all her life that mother did not appreciate her best intentions.

            Once Kate was feeding chickens, when suddenly Feodor ran in with the dogs. A pig got scared by the dogs and ran towards Kate. Kate landed atop of the pig and rode it across the yard…

            The day I was born our cow ate too much clover and died of bloat. My mother was in bed and nobody could rescue the cow.

My father, Boris Dranicyn (1855 – 1930?), belonged to the peasantry. I don’t mean he came from a farmer’s family; he had been an orphan since childhood; he didn’t remember his parents; and he had no siblings or relatives. In the Russian Empire, everyone belonged to one or another estate (social class), and no official document contained only the name of a person without mentioning his estate. So my father belonged to the peasantry – the lowest, ignoble estate. When I was a little girl, I even thought that fathers had no relatives. I was surprised when my friends would say, “My uncle is my father’s brother,” or “My aunt is my father’s sister.” I would ask, “How can a father have a brother or a sister?”

            My papa had no relatives. Who raised and taught him, I don’t know, but he was an educated town dweller. He read to his children with eloquence; sometimes in the evening he read us short stories by Chekhov and Averchenko; we laughed, and we liked such evenings very much. But which formal education he’d gotten, we didn’t ask. Despite his skills, however, he was a low-ranking official, and earned too little; nonetheless, I was admitted to secondary school as the daughter of a government employee.

            When he married my mother, he was a feldscher [a medical orderly who usually acquired his limited skills in the army, and carried out basic medical treatment for the village people]. My grandmother, for reasons unknown to me, condemned this marriage. She didn’t even visit my mother and her children. I saw my grandmother in Wilno [now Vilnius, Lithuania] only once, when she came to visit her son, our uncle Nick.

            Papa had a practice in Slutsk [now Belarus], where my mother had been born and where they married. He was a popular doctor, my mother said, and his patients believed in his skills (“Doctor Boris can heal.”).

            I don’t know why papa quit his job, why he moved to Warsaw [now Poland] and why my parents settled in Nowogeorgiewsk [Modlin, now a part of Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki, Poland], near Warsaw, where papa took a job as a forest ranger. There my papa hunted, and my mother kept a big house. She had one cow, pigs, poultry and my father’s hounds, which helped him when he hunted rabbits. I was born there I remember nothing about that time near Warsaw; everything I know is from my mother’s stories. And I want to write here only what I know and remember about my papa.

            My papa was a man who liked his life as it was. He liked to sing. He had a nice voice and we loved to listen to him when he sang “I Go Out on the Road Alone” or “There Is a Rock on Volga River” and other songs he liked. We loved to gather around him when he sat at the table and drew. He especially liked to draw horses.

            When we live in Wilno, there was a path from our back yard to the bank of a river, the Wileyka. Early in the morning, my papa got up and went to swim. When he returned, he boiled eggs in the samovar [a heated metal container, traditionally used to heat and boil water in and around Russia]. Then, standing outside our room he woke me up because it was time to go to school. Every night at dinner he drank one shot of vodka, and every 20^th –pay-day – he invited a friend over and they both got drunk. And every time we had to throw his friend out. We did it this way. Sitting at the table, we would start little by little to turn the wick down. It would become darker and darker. If papa was not completely drunk, he would ask us to put more kerosene into the lamp, but we would answer that there was no more kerosene in the house, and that all the shops were closed already. And when the lamp produced almost no light, we would put his friend’s hat on his head and push him out the door. And papa would quietly go to bed.

            But sometimes when he was drunk, he would become aggressive. He beat mother and we the children had to save her. Sometimes he attacked me. My school expenses were very heavy to bear for my parents, and he was unhappy about it. My mother’s uncle, Mr. Stawrowicz, was the head of the school district, and all Stawrowicz children went to school for free. But we were the Dranicyn, not the Stawrowicz family.

            But such dark days were rare. Sometimes papa was in a good mood, took time to talk with us, and asked what we had learned in school. He liked to read to us and was happy when we listened to him attentively. Once we had a bet. Papa wanted a herring, and there was no herring in the house. It was late in the evening and all the shops were closed. And [my friend] Sonia and I bet papa that we could get him a herring. If we did, he would walk under the table on all fours. He agreed because he was sure we couldn’t. But the owner of one shop, an old Jew, liked me. We ran to him and got a herring. How we laughed when papa went under the table!

            Because of me papa had one more inconvenience: my mother asked him to accompany me to school. We were both unhappy about it. But soon we made a decision. We would walk together only part of the way to the corner of Mlynowa (Mill) street. Then I would turn right and let papa go free.

            In our last years in Wilno my father changed. He stopped drinking. But every evening at 6 o’clock he went out, in a nice clean suit, his hair covered with brilliantine cream, in a fresh shirt ironed by mom. He had always been good looking, and was especially so now. It was very sad, for we knew the reason. We noticed that he left exactly at 6 and, when the clock started to strike, Sonia and I started to count loudly: “One, two, three, four…” The door slammed, but we continued: “Six!” It was a sad joke, because he was going on a date. When we evacuated with the Germans near the city, he remained in Wilno, with his girlfriend.

            Father remained in Wilno until the last day. Then he evacuated to Kostroma, several hundred miles from Orel, where we were staying. Mother decided to go to Kostroma and persuade father to come back to the family. She took Sasha, my younger sister, with her, because father loved his youngest daughter very much. It is strange, but I did not remember this, and my sister  told me about it recently with great sadness. She told me how rude father was: he slept in a bed and mother and she had to sleep on the floor. Mother was abused and angry; she returned to us and never spoke about father anymore.

            Then the Polish army took Wilno, and Poland regained independence from Russia. After the truce between Poland and Soviet Russia took hold there was a moment when it was possible to leave Russia, and father returned to Wilno. Josef Pilsudski became the head of the Polish state.

Father wrote to us. He sent letters to everybody – to Kate, to me, to Feodor. And once he wrote to Feodor: “Pilsudski sends his best wishes to you.” It was Feodor’s friend from military school, not the head of state. But this letter was a fatal mistake. Soviet authorities hated Pilsudski because he had defeated the Red Army and defended Polish independency. I think this letter was one of the reasons why Feodor was recently executed.

            Father wrote to us until the end of 1920; then the letters stopped. He lived in Wilno to his death and was buried in an Orthodox Cemetery. When my grandson Boris and I were in Wilno in 1965, I wanted to find his grave. But we had no time: we were late for a flight to Palanga [Lithuania].