Selected text
My daughter Emma was born in 1995 in Leningrad. After graduating from secondary school the question of where to do further studies had to be answered. I really wanted to believe, while my daughter was growing up and my husband was serving in the army, that she wouldn’t have to deal with the problem of anti-Semitism when she entered the institute, but it turned out that little had changed.
In the upper classes of school Emma studied with a very talented boy named Igor Zaer. He won all the physics olympiads in Leningrad. But his health was poor and therefore he had lived with and had been brought up by his grandmother and grandfather until 9th grade, somewhere in the center of Russia. He had been raised to believe that justice is everywhere and that there is no problem with anti-Semitism anywhere in the USSR. He came to Leningrad believing this, and decided, after graduating from school, to enter the Leningrad State University; that was his great dream. Both his parents and his friends tried to talk him out of applying, but he answered that it was all slander. “I don’t believe it and I’ll be accepted,” he said. His documents weren’t even taken and this was a blow for him. He tried to enter somewhere else, I don’t remember where, with the same result. In the end he entered the Pedagogical Institute, but all this had broken him. He studied for 3 or 4 months, then committed suicide. He left his bag on the Lieini Bridge with his notes and a message, “I don’t want to live like this and it cannot be otherwise.” He was his parents’ only son. That the university was closed for Jews was something that he couldn’t get over. His grandmother and grandfather had raised him to believe that we didn’t have such a problem, and he turned out to be unprepared to deal with it. It was a horrible shock for all the children at that school, and not only for his class!
In the upper classes of school Emma studied with a very talented boy named Igor Zaer. He won all the physics olympiads in Leningrad. But his health was poor and therefore he had lived with and had been brought up by his grandmother and grandfather until 9th grade, somewhere in the center of Russia. He had been raised to believe that justice is everywhere and that there is no problem with anti-Semitism anywhere in the USSR. He came to Leningrad believing this, and decided, after graduating from school, to enter the Leningrad State University; that was his great dream. Both his parents and his friends tried to talk him out of applying, but he answered that it was all slander. “I don’t believe it and I’ll be accepted,” he said. His documents weren’t even taken and this was a blow for him. He tried to enter somewhere else, I don’t remember where, with the same result. In the end he entered the Pedagogical Institute, but all this had broken him. He studied for 3 or 4 months, then committed suicide. He left his bag on the Lieini Bridge with his notes and a message, “I don’t want to live like this and it cannot be otherwise.” He was his parents’ only son. That the university was closed for Jews was something that he couldn’t get over. His grandmother and grandfather had raised him to believe that we didn’t have such a problem, and he turned out to be unprepared to deal with it. It was a horrible shock for all the children at that school, and not only for his class!
Period
Location
Leningrad
Russia
Interview
Emiliya Israilovna Shulman