Tag #132411 - Interview #99821 (Elina Falkenshtein)

I was born in Riga in November 1938. We had a loving and happy family. In the summers we would rent a dacha in Yurmala as was proper in the years before the war. I devoted my entire life to pedagogy, and worked in many schools in Riga as well as at the Institute for Teacher Training. For the last ten years, however, I’ve been working in Riga’s Jewish school. I was this school’s vice-principal, in charge of academics, and the deputy director. Now I teach mathematics. To be honest, I’ve always been more interested in the work of a pedagogue than mathematics.

I finished school in 1954, right after the dethroning of Stalin’s cult of personality [see Twentieth Party Congress] [8], when we were all in a very strange state of mind. I finished secondary school at the age of 16, and I had enough time for serious thought. I already knew that I would go work in a school; there were no other thoughts in my mind. I began to add everything up: first, there was no place in Riga to obtain a qualification in elementary school education. Secondly, I was always adept at learning history and literature, but I decided it wasn’t possible for me to associate myself with history or literature. Because, what was I to tell children in three or four years? Chemistry and physics, I felt, should only be taught by men. All that was left to me was mathematics because, no matter what happens, 2 times 2 is 4.