Tag #148055 - Interview #83579 (Rita Razumovskaya)

Jews were separated into two groups: some forgot that they were Jewish, since it didn’t play any important role in everyday life, and others remembered that they were Jewish. And that could be seen in statements such as: ‘He plays the violin well, that means that he is Jewish,’ or ‘He is a great mathematician, that means he is a Jew.’ In our family we didn’t have such attitudes, even though Zinovy Aronovich liked such things, and liked them very much. However, it wasn’t vulgar, he did it elegantly, and there existed some families, where it was awful, even horrible, this emphasis. I knew such families. In my opinion, it is just the same as anti-Semitism. And it aroused the same emotions.

There were such Jewish families before the Great Patriotic War, and when the Doctors’ Plot [18] started, and the troubles began, the number of those families only increased. In the 1950s there were a lot of families, where they said that Jews were the best, and that they were God’s Chosen People, that they made the [October] Revolution, and that’s the only reason to like this Revolution. I knew a lot of people saying: ‘Bolsheviks organized the [October] Revolution, and Bolsheviks were mainly Jews, that’s why this Revolution is a good one.’ Those people annoyed me so much!