Jelena Ejchgorn

“What we remember – well, the village where we grew up was Novogradka, and we speak Czech. My husband is a German national, but he speaks Czech, and we speak Czech at home. (To her husband) Hello! Husband: I’m listening… And the children: they understand us, but they don’t speak. Russian is spoken everywhere, and so they speak Russian. We thus understand Czech and we ourselves speak Czech. Just like your parents? Yes, like our parents. Mother was a pure Czech, and grandmother was Czech, grandparent was Latvian, the second grandmother was Czech and the grandfather was Czech. And so we speak like that.”

“How a wedding looked like? At first, when they engage, the woman does not go out with the man like the Russians do; in our place it’s only men who go out to celebrate. And they were also shooting on the wedding day, during the whole day. When the young couple was to kiss, they would fire a shot and the bride and groom would kiss. Then they take off her wreath and they put a scarf on her head.” (So Količkova is that girl’s new name?) Yes, they always fill in her new surname. Now they shout ´hor´ instead, but it was not done when I was young – in my youth, they were shooting, and the couple then had to kiss.” Then we went and invited everybody from his family and then there was the wedding. They prepared flowers for the wedding, all the young people who were invited, and the girls created special flower ribbons and gave them to their sweethearts, to show that he was her boyfriend. Boys and girls were decorated with the ribbons.