That’s me with my grandson Ilia at our dacha outside Moscow. The picture was taken in Ulianovo in 1972.

My son has two children: Ilia, born in 1972, and Evgenia, born in 1980.

I didn’t plan to leave when the mass immigration (of Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel) took place in the 1970s. I was born and raised here. I fought for this country. My relatives are buried here. My children are here, too. I understood that my wife and I weren’t young anymore, and that it would be hard for us to get adjusted to a new mode of life.

I became a pensioner in 1987 and have been a story-writer since then. My stories are mostly tales about war, some of them are memoirs. Some of them were published, others are waiting to be.