Tag #144602 - Interview #97065 (Irina Soboleva-Ginsburg )

I also studied at the Russian secondary school until 1935. I don’t know whether there were any Jewish schools in Moscow at that time. I remember some Jewish teachers in our school. One of them was Semyon Gurevich, a very ugly man. He noticed that I wrote nice poems. I wrote about Soviet labor and about Lenin. I can still remember one of my patriotic poems: ‘Pishno znamia nad gornami. Silen vzmah. Trah! Vo ves’ duh. Uh! Tut po vsiudu i vsegda slishna muzika truda’ or ‘Spi Ilich v svoey mogile. Mi tebia liubili i stroitelstvo razvili v nashey krasnoy storone’. [Translation: ‘Bright flames over horns. Strong flap. Trach! Full tilt. Ouch! There is music of labor everywhere and always’, or ‘Sleep, Illich, in your grave. We loved you and stated construction in our red country’.] I was four when Lenin died in 1924, but we were raised as his followers at school. At home nobody ever discussed the subject of Soviet leaders.