This is a picture of my father Maks Skoblo with his brother Isaac Skoblo. The photo was taken in Vitebsk in the 1920s.
My father came from Vitebsk, a provincal town in Belarus. His family lived there. He finished the Belarus national school in Vitebsk where he studied for 10 years, from 1906 to 1916.
My grandparents had many children, but I only know the names of my father, Aunt Mira and my uncles Isaac and Abram. Their older daughter Rakhil died at a very young age. My father was offered a position at the department of neurosurgery at the Military Medical Academy after graduation. He got the degree of a professor very quickly and later became head of the Institute of Neurosurgery. Our family was absolutely non-religious. We didn't think about religion in those times. Although my father was a very educated man, knew Yiddish and Hebrew, and had his bar mitzvah as a child, he didn't pray or celebrate Jewish holidays as an adult during the Soviet times. He became an atheist and a communist.
