Tag #148328 - Interview #95114 (Lazar Sherishevskiy)

In Gorkiy I entered the University, but before I sent a telegram to the Minister of Education to issue me a permit to take entrance exams since the university management was reluctant to accept my documents considering my biography and my being a Jew. The Minister sent them a directive to allow me to take exams. I passed my exams with ‘5’ marks [top marks] and they had to admit me. I finished the philological Faculty well. I started to have my works published. I couldn’t even think about post-graduate studies considering the booming state anti-Semitism. We were hard up at the time. I received a stipend and my wife received her very low salary of a librarian. After the University I got a job assignment to the ‘Gorkovskiy rabochiy’ newspaper  [‘the Gorkiy worker’], a central newspaper in Gorkiy where I worked for about 1.5 years. Then I was forced to quit, not without a Jewish context. Nobody told me anything directly, but there were no Jewish  employees in central newspapers. There might have been an unspoken direction about it, I don’t know, but the fact is, there were no Jewish employees. I became a free lance writer.  I wrote for newspapers and TV and earned my living thus. Some time later my books were published and I joined the union of writers.