Tag #125983 - Interview #78405 (Rafael Beraha)

My brothers loved books. I also share that passion. We read mainly progressive literature. It was mainly social and politically active literature, sympathizing with the left, that is the communist ideas. From the magazines we read ‘Priroda’ [Nature], ‘Hiperion’, ‘Borba Sreshtu Alkoholizma’ [Fight against Alcoholism’], the so-called ‘Vazrozhdenska Chitanka’ [The Reading Book on Abstinence] and from the newspapers we read ‘Zarya’ [Sunrise]. These newspapers and magazines were dailies or weeklies, but they were oriented to the left, the communist ideas. Their goal was to educate the youth in the so-called ‘communist virtues’ such as solidarity, unity of thought and equality, abstinence from alcohol and cigarettes, rational and ‘fanatic’ temperance in everything. From the novels we read ‘The Quiet Don’ by Sholokhov [7] and ‘18th Year’ by Alexey Tolstoy. We also read a lot of Zionist literature – for example, the reader ‘The Jewish State’ published by Theodor Herzl [8]. We kept them in the attic later on.