Tag #120616 - Interview #89576 (Tobijas Jafetas)

I successfully passed my entrance exams to the Chemical Faculty. However, Buchas, the rector of Vilnius University, who came from Kaunas and knew my father very well, said that sons from bourgeois families were not to study at the university, and I was not admitted there. Anna’s friend helped me. She was married to the pro-rector of the Teachers’ Training College, and I was admitted to the Faculty of Physics and Mathematic. I studied well. I was well-loved at home. Masha’s family treated me like their son. I wasn’t an active Komsomol member, but I liked amateur performance clubs. I was involved in the amateur theater performances and sang in the folk choir. This choir toured all over Lithuania on plain trucks. I had many Lithuanian friends and never felt an outcast like I did in the ghetto. When in the early 1950s all newspapers trumpeted about cosmopolitan Jews [see campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’] [22], this anti-Semitic campaign also affected me. I was excluded from the Komsomol, not for being Jewish, but for having a bourgeois origin. I was a success with my studies and finished the college with the highest grades. I wanted to attend post-graduate studies, but I wasn’t admitted there, without any explanation. I was told I was to work off whatever money the state had spent on my education.