Broha Mordukhovna Yasnogorodskaya, Valentina Ilyinichna Smolyan, Raisa Abramovna Sonkina, Laura Alexandrovna Verolajnen,

This photo shows my mother, Broha Mordukhovna Yasnogorodskaya and three of her friends. It was taken in 1950 in Leningrad after she defended her Ph.D. thesis on Schiller`s creative work.

My mother is second from the right. First from the left is Valentina Ilyinichna Smolyan, whose husband worked on the editorial staff of the "Zvezda" newspaper; second from the left is Raisa Abramovna Sonkina (they both are Jews), and first from the right is Laura Alexandrovna Verolajnen, wife of the scientist N. Ya. Berkovsky.

Mother entered the Pokrovsky State Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad in 1938, in the department of Russian language and literature. On graduation in 1940, she began a post-graduate course in German literature. Her studies were discontinued because of the war in 1941, but she resumed them in 1945.

My mother was the daughter of Nehama and Mordukh Yasnodogodsky. She was born in 1908 in Saratov, where Mordukh took part in performances and occasionally sang in the choir of the Saratov Operatic Theatre.

He also worked there as an accountant. In Saratov, she finished the 9-year school and studied at the conservatory. Her musical education was overseen by her uncle, the opera singer Mikhail Medvedev.

In 1925, after he died, the entire Yasnogorodsky family moved to Kiev.

From 1925 to 1929 Broha studied at the Kiev conservatory. In 1928 she met Lazar Futoryan in Kiev, and they got married.