Tag #140301 - Interview #78021 (sima medved)

I was my father's favorite, and his brothers and sisters liked me best, too. When my father went to visit them he took me with him to boast about me. They believed I was the smartest and wittiest in the family. My father was very proud of me. When I turned 6 my father took me to school and asked them to admit me earlier because I was so smart. My twin sisters were already at school, but they had problems with studying whereas I already knew the alphabet and numbers, although nobody had taught me specifically. I was admitted to school, even though the standard age to begin school was 8. The only problem was that I was too short to write on the blackboard and had to stand on a stool.

The school was a one-storied brick building. (We studied Russian, arithmetic, geography and the history of Russia at school. Boys and girls studied together. There was a big portrait of Tsar Nicholas on the wall above the blackboard in our classroom, and we sang the Russian anthem, 'God, save the tsar...', every morning. There were no religious classes at school. [Editor's note: The tsarist government was interested in the assimilation of Jewish farmers and tried to distance them from Judaism and Jewish traditions. The government opened Russian elementary schools in colonies.]) I was a success at school. Our schoolteachers weren't Jewish and didn't live in the colony. They arrived at school on a horse-driven cart every morning.