This picture was taken in my son Wlodzimierz's home, in Warsaw, in 2003. There's my mom, Gustawa Birencwajg, my son, Wlodimierz Leszczynski, my granddaughter, Zofia Leszczynska and me, Halina Leszczynska.
I live with my mother. I don't have a good old-age pension, a teacher's pension, I didn't work overtime, but I did manage to write several handbooks for studying Russian. I started off with cartoons, later adaptations of classic books, later, as a co-author, we wrote some handbooks and then I did that on my own. But the school system reform has just begun, so all my textbooks are useless now, nobody's learning from them.
For some time after I retired I kept working. At first I worked part-time at the Institute, at my old workplace, because I was a senior lecturer there. I later worked in a private college, an economics-computers college. I worked there for a few years, but I gave that up, because I only had a few hours a week there, it wasn't worth the trouble of going back and forth. I also did private tutoring at home then. Now I don't have school, tutoring, nothing. 'Vsyo' [Russian for 'everything'] is over. I don't even have the fees for the textbooks.
Now I am 76 years of age. Whether one likes it or not, well, I like it the least. I didn't remarry. No one suggested it to me. Perhaps I would have considered it. I have a good son, but he's got his family, his own problems. I have a sister here, nearby, she lives 5 minutes away from me. She's also got a daughter. But her daughter has her own family, two grown daughters. One of them is starting high school this year, the other one next year.
My sister is also married to a Pole. We degenerated, that is, got married to non-Jews perhaps because there was no other solution. My friends in Israel ask me, 'Why did your son marry a Pole?' Well, was he supposed to be a bachelor all his life? He met her during some sailing trip, organized by Doctor Andrzej Jaczewski, now a well known sexologist. They're a very good couple, they've been together for almost 30 years.