Tag #143721 - Interview #78181 (Maya Dembo)

I finished school in 1951, since I lost about one and a half years because of all these evacuation trips. I wanted to enter the philological faculty of Leningrad University, but my parents advised me to not even try to submit my documents there, in order to save time, strength and nerves, as Jews weren't accepted to university openly at that time. I got the same advice from Natasha, my friend and neighbor in our communal apartment. She was two years older than me, Russian and studied at the faculty of law.

I submitted my documents to Leningrad Library Institute. I passed the entrance exams fine, got one 'good' mark and the rest were 'excellent'. However, the entrance examination commission asked me to bring an excerpt from my parents' biography, explaining why I was born in Paris.

Were my parents white emigrants or not? Why did they live there? A Jewess and moreover, born in Paris! My father wrote an explanation, I entered the institute with difficulty, but studied well and with pleasure. We had a very strong literature sub-faculty, consisting of famous Russian and foreign literature specialists, who were driven away from the university, for being Jews or so-called 'cosmopolitans' [18], who weren't exiled to far away camps so far.