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Family Is All That Matters 38 Iosif's birth was defined in terms of the Jewish lifecycle. His mother Hava always recalled her son's birth as occurring seven weeks aer Shavuot, the holiday that celebrates the Jewish people receiving the Torah. Hava, the daughter of a rabbi, measured births, deaths, and other important milestones against the eternal calendar of Jewish lifecycle events. At any rate, it was on a Sunday that Iosif was born in Gorodok. We have seen how Iosif grew up with his family there and in Moscow, and how he arrived with them in Tashkent in February, 1942. In June of that year, just before Iosif turned 18, he was draed. When he was asked how he thought he Above: Iosif in Leninokan, Armenia, 1946. Previous page: Iosif Volsun in Leninokan, Armenia, 1947, during his time in the Soviet Union Airforce. With his advancement, his salary increased by 50 percent. could best serve the Motherland, Iosif indicated he wanted to be an airplane pilot. Iosif had never been on an airplane; he just thought that being a pilot was very exciting. "Every young boy wanted to be a pilot when I was growing up," Iosif recalls. He didn't like being in the war, but the prospect of learning to fly an airplane—of being a pilot!—was exciting. It didn't quite work out the way Iosif expected, but very little does in war. Although his superiors promised him that he would be sent to Tajikistan to receive pilot training, when he arrived at the base, the reality was a little different. An officer met Iosif and all the recruits at the train station. "Welcome, future pilots," the officer greeted the recruits. Iosif 's heart was lied. But then the officer made a small admission. This base was not a school for airplane pilots. Rather, it was a base for training airplane mechanics. The officer said that Stalin had decreed that before any soldier could be trained as a pilot, he had to be first trained as a mechanic. Iosif understood enough of the military to know that he had just lost any hope of becoming an airplane pilot. Still, he decided to be the best mechanic possible. Iosif learned how to repair military airplanes. It was a good education, but very demanding. The training alternated weekly between classroom study and hands-on work at a nearby aircra factory. Sometimes the students were required to go to the nearby fields to pick cotton for the war effort. It was brutal, backbreaking work and some students couldn't stand it. Iosif remembers one of his classmates had a nervous breakdown and ate the raw cotton. He had little to no money, but Iosif was endlessly creative in working the system. For example, sometimes the army required him to go to nearby Kazakhstan. While there, he noticed that salt, so scarce in Russia, was plentiful in Kazakhstan. He filled bags with salt, and back in Russia the people took salt in exchange for tobacco. Most soldiers smoked

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