Rabinoviches, go forth! Don t be ashamed of your l

Rabinoviches, go forth! Don't be ashamed of your  last name!

By: Raisa Rabinovich
               
How the surname Rabinovich helped us escape a fine.

Remember the joke:
Two Odessan residents were in a car and drove through a red light. A police officer pulls them over and orders them to pay a fine.
The driver asks the officer:
- Do you also issue fines to Nobel Prize recipients?
The inspector saluted and said, “I apologize, you are free to leave.”
The car drove away. The second Odessan asks, “Are you a Nobel Prize winner?”
“No,” responds the first, “but I can ask!”
 
I'll start my story from afar. One of my former students decided to surprise me and send me a photo of the entrance of the apartment that we used to inhabit in Kharkov, where we once lived before moving to America. The girl took a picture of our former windows, and we looked carefully, but did not recognize our apartment. There were no balconies! The bushes and trees that we had planted had been cut down! And apart from that, the apartment had become a hair salon and some kind of social club. We were shocked! Many of our relatives had visited us often and probably remember this 12-story building.

Speaking of relatives… our first guests at that apartment had visited us a couple weeks after we had moved in. We had never before seen these people, who turned out to be distant relatives from Belarus.
When I had arrived home from that evening, a man opened the door, invited me to enter and said that I was not mistaken. He and a friend had come to Kharkov on a business trip from Dnepropetrovsk—and they told me, “welcome to your own apartment!” Isn’t that funny!

The husband was already at home, preparing dinner for everyone with a toothy grin. Of course, we could not sleep all night and worried. See, it happens. And if the husband had got another wife, not so gullible? That’s right, she would have kicked him out!

We were assigned this three-room apartment when our youngest son was just six years old. A new housing complex had been built in a local neighborhood, Alekseevka, near other 12- and 16-story apartments that were nearing the end of construction. So my husband applied for new housing from his construction office and they started distributing apartments as construction was still ongoing. Our turn was still far away, but our family got lucky—no one wanted to get an apartment on the first floor. It was considered bad because everyone would walk by it on the way up to their apartments (but on the bright side, you never had to walk up stairs and the apartment always had enough water pressure!). My husband and I talked, and one evening, I called a friend and asked to put the children to bed while we went to look at the new building.

It took a long time to get there, and we had to literally jump over blocks and large stones to enter. There were no doors or steps in the house yet. My husband helped me up to the first floor, and there, he, an electrical engineer, carefully examined everything and showed me the future locations of the bedrooms, kitchen, and bathroom. We decided that our family would have a great home there! After all, everyone remembers that the four of us lived in the same room for 12 years—you don’t have to ask me how inconvenient it was! But there it was, the joy of an apartment with 3 separate bedrooms with two balconies!

How beautiful it was! Around us was a silent forest, with clean air! After we moved there, my husband’s allergies worsened, and they unfortunately tormented him all his life. In the winter, our whole family would go skiing, and in the fall, we would go to the forest to gather hazelnuts. A while after we moved in, we also planted a small garden, where we grew and harvested vegetables.

After a long wait, we finally had our documents for our apartment in-hand! My husband went to would visit the local furniture store several times a week, all while working at night. Unfortunately, the construction company had not entirely finished the building; they had not set up the electric wiring nor the elevator. But we didn’t need an elevator!

My knowledgeable husband resolved the electricity issue quickly; he connected the wires and… hooray! Let there be light! After that, we had to clean and prepare the apartment… we were very lucky to get such a large apartment. We thought that our apartment could have been a model apartment for the building, since it had perfectly-laid wallpaper and an oak parquet floor—everything was ready!

The husband decided to clean the parquet, so he got a special cleaning machine. And he cleaned it so well that the imperfections on the floor are still probably shining! I followed behind him with a vacuum cleaner to gather the dust. The loud noise was terrible.

After we finished, we discovered that someone had stolen an additional door from us from the entryway.

But our story is less about doors and more about lightbulbs—here are a few riddles about lightbulbs.

A little flower
Like a pear tree, hangs from the ceiling
It grows upside down.
But don’t try to eat this pear!
Glowing, like the sun
Drop it—it will break.

A golden bird
Flies into the house into the evening,
And lights up the whole house.
Routed under the ceiling
Is a long wire.
The orb is screwed on—
And it lights up.

It’s a lightbulb!

I tried searching for short stories or songs about this very important household item, but for some reason they were all either vulgar or poorly-written. Therefore, we serenade our friend, the lightbulb, in riddles!

The lightbulb is, in fact, the culprit of my story. A policeman, (not Uncle Styopa, a character from a Russian folk story), saw that this bright light was lighting up our apartment one evening, and he rang our doorbell. I noticed that now in Russia it is fashionable to say: “What do you want?” I opened the door (but didn’t say that).

The policeman was wearing a uniform; he introduced himself, but I don’t even remember his surname. He asked what we were doing there. We explained that we had been preparing the apartment for our family’s arrival, washing everything and arranging the newly-arrived furniture.
He asked, “Why do you have light bulbs in your house, when no one else in the apartment has electricity?”

“Well, how are we supposed to work on our apartment without lighting?” we answered, surprised. Suddenly, the policeman remembered his duties. He demanded from us our passports and documents for the apartment. We, as law-abiding citizens, showed him the necessary documents. The policeman carefully looked through everything and asked, “Is your last name Rabinovich?”
We answered, “Yes!”
“And is the head of department x of the city of Kharkov, Comrade Rabinovich, your relative?”
My husband answers, “We are all relatives.” The policeman, saluting us, immediately left the apartment. Now, there’s a famous name for you!

So, don’t be ashamed of your surname—it may one day prove useful!