Naum Shukhman

This is Naum Shukhman (1913-1980), my uncle and the youngest brother of my mom; this photo was taken in the 1930s in Leningrad.

During the war he was a pilot. Their squadron flew to bomb Berlin during the war. After the end of the war he served in the Far East (Kamchatka and Sakhalin) of the USSR. Naum was the last child in the large family of Avraham Shukhman, my grandfather.

After I finished school, one day Mother’s brother Naum visited us, at that time he served in Chita; he was a second in command – a pilot-scout. He came together with his wife and invited me to go with him. We lived in need, and he told me that it would be easier for me to enter an institute there, than in Leningrad. At that time I dreamed to become a teacher, a teacher of history.

In Leningrad it was really difficult to enter an institute, and we had nothing to live on, therefore I decided to leave for Chita, to follow Uncle Naum’s advice. There I entered the Pedagogical Institute – History Faculty, later we were merged with the Foreign Languages Faculty, and later – with the Literary Faculty. So I graduated from the History and Philology Faculty in 1959.