Tag #132340 - Interview #99821 (Elina Falkenshtein)

When, at the beginning of the 1950s, the attacks against cosmopolitans [see campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’] [2] and the Doctors’ Plot [3] began, my father was forced to leave his work; he was probably asked to leave. By this time Papa had become the head of a large corporation. He was dismissed from the Communist Party. During these days, in one of the rooms of our big, seven-bedroom apartment from before the war, there was a stove, which we ‘fed’ all 30 volumes of a pre-war edition of Dubnow’s [4] body of work. I can still see Mama, or Papa, I don’t remember who, throwing volumes into the stove. The cover of that edition was white and someone had cut out the title and author so that, if the NKVD [5] should happen to come by, they wouldn’t know the author. We had many, many books in Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew.