Tag #155570 - Interview #94720 (Sarra Shylman)

I went to a kindergarten as a child. It was difficult to get into a kindergarten in those years. Since I had bronchial asthma and needed special food they sent me to a kindergarten as an ill child. My sister and brother got no opportunity to get permission to go to the kindergarten. It was a Jewish kindergarten. I was too small and my brother and sister and other children from our yard took me to the kindergarten. We spoke Yiddish, sang Jewish songs, and recited Jewish poems in this kindergarten. I particularly liked verses by Lev Kvitko [10]. There was a bookstand not far from our house and my father bought me children’s books. I remember how they smelled, but I’ve forgotten in what language they were. We didn’t have books by Jewish authors at home, but I remember a collection of poems by Shevchenko [11].

After the kindergarten I went to a Jewish lower secondary school. It was a policy then that children were to study in their national schools. Admission to my school required that I passed an interview. I knew Yiddish and my admission was positively resolved. When it was time for Olia to go to school she went to the interview in the Jewish school and said there in Yiddish ‘I don’t speak Yiddish’. She had Russian friends in the yard and didn’t want to go to the Jewish school, but they admitted her anyway.