Tag #114957 - Interview #78047 (Eva Ryzhevskaya)

Father and his brothers finished the Ukrainian four-year elementary school in the village. There was no other educational institution in that village. Father was very gifted, and wanted to continue studying. He applied for the Russian lyceum in Dnepropetrovsk. Most of the students had to pay tuition, but the headmaster of the lyceum was entitled to admit some gifted students free of charge, as some charity organization was paying for them. But my father didn't succeed in that. He was told that there were only three percent out of the overall number of students, who didn't have to pay tuition, and those three percent had already been admitted. Besides, there was a five percent quota [3] for Jewish students admitted to educational institutions. Even if there had been money for tuition, my father still might not have been admitted because of that quota. He began studying independently. He had a lot of books. He bought both textbooks and fiction. During his adolescence my father began writing his own stories and novels. He still had that hobby at a mature age.