It was taken in Nevsky Avenue, at the Kazan Cathedral, opposite the House of Book, in spring, in the second half of the 1920s. Mother was not married yet - she is at the centre in this snapshot. At the left is my mother's cousin Abram Isaevich Zlobinsky. Both of them entered the University then. But they both were expelled from the university - as persons of bourgeois origin. Abram became a journalist, for a long time worked in "The Red Newspaper" and took a pseudonym Lukian Piterskoi. And mother entered the Leningrad Institute of Municipal Construction Engineers, which later merged with the Institute of Civil Engineers. … You can also see my Grandfather's younger brother on this snapshot, but I do not know what to say about him except for the fact that he was a big reveler and it is noticeable here; he is second from the left. Who is near him, I do not know. And near mother stands her friend, but I can't say anything about her, neither about the second woman. Wearing a peaked-cap is mother's elder brother Syoma. Judging by his uniform and from what I know, at that time he worked in state security bodies.
My mother Àida Leibovna Levit (nee Golshmid) was born in 1906 in St.Petersburg. Before revolution, in lower classes, she studied in the well-known female Stayuninskaya grammar school. She was telling me about that grammar school with delight, that there was good order and, by the way, no anti-Semitism ever existed. One of the subjects was the Law of God, and the Jews were allowed to skip those lessons. And in general there was no anti-Semitism in the attitudes of people with whom my grandmother and grandfather communicated. Anti-Semitism in their circle in general was considered a shame. A person who showed any sign of anti-Semitism, was simply announced a boycott. After the revolution, in 1924, Mum finished a school in Petrograd that was located in the building of the former 1-st grammar school for boys in Kabinetskaya Street (now Pravdy Street).
