...As a child, I didn't like relatives. There were many of them. They appeared from somewhere far away, kissed with slobbery lips and - the most disgusting thing - I had to kiss them too. Mom would say: "Borik, kiss your aunt..."

I didn't like kissing back then...

Sometimes they came to visit with their children, my cousins. I liked that. Then we would have up to 30 relatives gathered at our home, sleeping in the attic and in the living room on cots... Mostly my mother's brothers and sisters came to visit us. My father's older brother Ruvim visited us with his grandchildren Lora and Garik only once, around 1950, I remember him reading newspapers of that time with reports from the Korean War fronts...

My interest in genealogy appeared around 1969, when in the magazine "Smena" I found a mention of a manager of some South American football team named Jorge Ratinov. At home, they never talked about any relatives abroad, and I didn't attach much importance to this fact at the time, but I noted it in my memory.

A year later I was visiting my uncle Ruvim's family in Moscow. By that time he had already died, his wife Olga Isaakovna - she was about eighty then - started talking about the past and I asked her about Jorge Ratinov. And then she told me and Garik, who was a student at the time, the history of our surname. It turned out that the founder of our family name was a foundling. He was found on the doorstep of a tavern on a frosty night in the early 19th century somewhere on the border of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. The tavern keeper's family took him in, nursed him, and gave him the Jewish name Leiba - Lyova.

Lyova grew up strong and intelligent. When he turned 13, he began helping the owner. His duties included cleaning rooms after guests. Once a wealthy cattle dealer forgot his wallet under a pillow. Leiba gave it to the owner. When the guest returned and got his wallet back, he gratefully took out a large banknote and asked the owner to keep it for Lyova until he came of age. When Lyova grew up, the cattle dealer took him as an apprentice and taught him how to make money in the cattle trade. Luck accompanied Lyova, and he quickly became wealthy.

As Olga Isaakovna told, he was married four times. He killed three wives in fits of rage, for which he got the nickname "Leiba-Kat". "Kat" in Ukrainian means "executioner". The fourth wife survived him. It is not known exactly how many children he had. Probably many. Now it's impossible to establish what happened to them. I only received information about three of them - David, Anisim, and Mendel - Leiba's children from his last wife.

Anisim was my great-grandfather. He lived in Ukraine, in the city of Elisavetgrad, now Kirovograd. I know nothing about the children of David and Mendel.

Anisim and Olga Gutchina - his wife - had 7 children. The eldest, Viktor Anisimovich, went to Argentina in 1882. His descendants - one of whom was the one mentioned by the magazine correspondent - moved from South America to the USA, I found them through the Internet. Since Viktor Anisimovich Ratinov emigrated through Germany, his surname was changed to Ratinoff. Eric Ratinoff, Viktor's great-grandson, lives in Sacramento; he helped me find photographs of Anisim Lvovich and his wife. These photos survived two world wars and were preserved during moves across oceans and continents.

Viktor's younger brother, Boris Anisimovich, was my grandfather. He was born in Elisavetgrad, now Kirovograd. His wife, Baba Sima, gave birth to 14 children, 11 of whom she raised. A photograph taken in 1925 has been preserved. It shows almost all of grandfather Boris's children, except for Mikhail and Georgy. The fourth in the top row is my father Samuil Borisovich.

Gradually, I began to accumulate more information about relatives, and I wanted to somehow summarize all the data and put it on public display on the Internet in the form of a FAMILY TREE. I hope that this information will interest both Ratinovs in the former USSR and representatives of our surname around the world - from South America to Israel. As you can see, my information is far from complete. I hope that together we can patch the holes in our genealogy. The time has passed when it was not recommended to show interest in relatives - who knows what undesirable information such excavations could bring... My excavations, for example, showed that the Ratinovs left a mark not only in the history of the Gulag - Ilya Anisimovich and Georgy Borisovich were executed - but also in the history of Chile - one of the streets in Santiago is named Ratinoff, there is a Ratinov Memorial Hospital in Israel. Arye Ratinov became the champion of Israel in Taekwondo in 2001. Perhaps these are not all the discoveries that the assembly of our puzzle will bring us...