Selected text
Before we went to school we had a governess: Olga, a German woman. She had graduated from Frebel school. She taught us the German language and my brothers and I knew German very well. She spent 5-6 hours every day with us. I have a good conduct of German even now. Our mother and father prepared us to school teaching us to read and write in Russian and count. In 1926 I went to take an entrance exam to a Russian school: since I could read and write in Russian and German I was admitted to the 2nd form. I remember a gym with high windows and a concert hall on the 4th floor. My brothers also studied in this school in the center of the town. The center of Kiev was populated by Party officials for the most part and their children studied in our school. There were 32 children in my class and 8 of them had the highest grades in all subjects. I was doing very well. I have bright memories about a bus tour to the woods in the outskirts of the city. We went to spend a day there and we enjoyed it a lot. I remember that I had Jewish friends in my class, although it wasn’t something that we did intentionally. We lived in the same street, went to school and home from school together. It was only after I grew up that I began to analyze and found out that there were Jewish children in our group while we didn’t even identify ourselves as Jews at that time. We remained friends for the rest of our life.
When I turned 10 I became a pioneer. There was an exciting ceremony when we had red neckties tied, it was a ceremony at the concert hall at school. We said an oath to be dedicated to the cause of Lenin and communist ideals. We always in school wore a pioneer uniform: a white shirt and a dark skirt or trousers. There were pioneer line meetings and pioneer competition in successes in studies and pioneer activities. There were teams of 5-6 pioneers formed: team members were children living in the same neighborhood and there had to be few weaker pupils in a team so that stronger ones helped them to catch up with the rest of their classmates in studies. I was a team leader and it was my task to push weaker pupils to be more thorough so that a whole team might get a higher grade for performance. I took every effort to make them study more and do their homework properly. I helped them after school. We did their homework together. Pupils also had to study a profession. We went to take training at the shoe factory located near our school. We made leather bags from leather wastes: those bags were sold. It is needless to say that we didn’t get any money for our work or get any profession there.
We always had newspapers at home: my father subscribed to ‘Pravda’ [founded in 1916, the biggest daily communist newspaper in the USSR] and ‘Izvestiya’ [a big daily communist newspaper] central newspapers. My brothers and I read them, but we always had to pile them on our father’s desk before he came home from work. We had a big collection of books and I read many Russian classical books, I liked Pushkin and Dostoevski. We had few books by Sholem Aleichem 14, a Jewish writer. I liked most of all his story ‘The Wandering Stars’. I read a lot and was very good at writing compositions at school. I discussed things with my father and valued his opinion highly. Our father returned from work late in the evening. In 1920– 30s he was a legal advisor at the town authorities and was always very busy. Our mother spent a lot of time with us. My father worked in his study even in the evenings and spent little time with us, but all the more we appreciated these sessions however short they were. We enjoyed talking with our father and always discussed interesting subject. Our father did not belong to the Party, I don’t know why he didn’t join it, but he knew the Marxism-Leninism philosophy. He was a teacher for many years and was awarded a title of ‘Red professor’ 15. He even had an appropriate certificate. My father wasn’t involved in any research work. There was a cult of my father in our family. He never did any work at home. Everything in the family served his interests. If he took a nap we tiptoed past his room not to disturb him.
When I turned 10 I became a pioneer. There was an exciting ceremony when we had red neckties tied, it was a ceremony at the concert hall at school. We said an oath to be dedicated to the cause of Lenin and communist ideals. We always in school wore a pioneer uniform: a white shirt and a dark skirt or trousers. There were pioneer line meetings and pioneer competition in successes in studies and pioneer activities. There were teams of 5-6 pioneers formed: team members were children living in the same neighborhood and there had to be few weaker pupils in a team so that stronger ones helped them to catch up with the rest of their classmates in studies. I was a team leader and it was my task to push weaker pupils to be more thorough so that a whole team might get a higher grade for performance. I took every effort to make them study more and do their homework properly. I helped them after school. We did their homework together. Pupils also had to study a profession. We went to take training at the shoe factory located near our school. We made leather bags from leather wastes: those bags were sold. It is needless to say that we didn’t get any money for our work or get any profession there.
We always had newspapers at home: my father subscribed to ‘Pravda’ [founded in 1916, the biggest daily communist newspaper in the USSR] and ‘Izvestiya’ [a big daily communist newspaper] central newspapers. My brothers and I read them, but we always had to pile them on our father’s desk before he came home from work. We had a big collection of books and I read many Russian classical books, I liked Pushkin and Dostoevski. We had few books by Sholem Aleichem 14, a Jewish writer. I liked most of all his story ‘The Wandering Stars’. I read a lot and was very good at writing compositions at school. I discussed things with my father and valued his opinion highly. Our father returned from work late in the evening. In 1920– 30s he was a legal advisor at the town authorities and was always very busy. Our mother spent a lot of time with us. My father worked in his study even in the evenings and spent little time with us, but all the more we appreciated these sessions however short they were. We enjoyed talking with our father and always discussed interesting subject. Our father did not belong to the Party, I don’t know why he didn’t join it, but he knew the Marxism-Leninism philosophy. He was a teacher for many years and was awarded a title of ‘Red professor’ 15. He even had an appropriate certificate. My father wasn’t involved in any research work. There was a cult of my father in our family. He never did any work at home. Everything in the family served his interests. If he took a nap we tiptoed past his room not to disturb him.
Location
Ukraine
Interview
Frida Khatset