Doctor Eberman and the Friedental colony

Doctor Eberman’s name runs through the family papers. It is his light verse about the life of Emil Strauss that closes the book My Dear Fannichka! Alongside him a German colony kept coming up, and that did not fit: the Wiesels were St. Petersburg officials and artists, while the colonists worked the land.

The explanation was in the reference books on Tsarskoye Selo. Alexander Eberman was a urologist and the author of several papers. His clinic stood on the Moscow road opposite the Friedental colony, in a house of his own, where he also treated surgical cases. He was married to one of the colonists and owned a plot inside the colony.

A dacha built for a friend

The rest is explained by the diary of Oskar Wiesel, the consul. His uncle Joseph Wiesel had been widowed, and Eberman, a close friend, offered him a dacha that he built expressly for him. The house turned out to be too large for one family, so the Wiesels moved in as well.

For the next three years we lived at Tsarskoye. Those three years we spent at Tsarskoye Selo, together with the years in Little Russia, will always remain the years my best memories belong to.

From the diary of Oskar Wiesel

So the "years in the colony" were not about colonists at all. The family lived on the doctor’s land because the doctor had built a house for a widowed friend.