Elka Vinograd and her schoolmates

This is a gymnasium [lyceum] photograph of my sister Elka Vinograd’s class, my sister is the third from the right standing in the upper row. This photo was taken in Orhei in the early 1920s.

My sister Elka had finished a Romanian gymnasium with honors a few years before. Then she went to Bucharest, where she entered university: Uncle Iosif Pagis advised her to enter the Pharmaceutical Faculty. Several years later Elka realized this wasn’t what she wanted to do. She liked literature. While continuing her studies at the Pharmaceutical Faculty she entered the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy of this University. Elka graduated with two diplomas: in Pharmacology and Literature. She went to work in the Jewish school in the town of Arciz. She worked as a teacher. In 1933 she married Mendel Vinograd, the director of this school.