Rimma Rozenberg

This is me, Rimma Rozenberg. This photo was taken in Odessa in 1941 on my thirteenth birthday. I got my first watch and was happy to show it off. My mother was so busy at work, that she practically forgot that I had to go to school at the age of eight. Then there was an epidemic of something a year later and my mother couldn't send me to school, so I went to the third grade in 1934. I studied in school number 25 at the end of Kanatnaya Street, on the corner of Bariatinskiy Lane. All my marks were excellent. I was top of the class in Russian literature. I was the best at writing. I read a lot. Before going to school I studied the children's encyclopedia published before the revolution and knew many historical facts. I made my teacher feel uncomfortable adding information to what she was telling us in her history classes. I liked humanities, though I also had excellent marks in physics and mathematics, but they weren't my favorite subjects. I just had to carry on. Besides my general school I also attended a music school and the ?school of drama recitation? that was in the same building in Langeronovskaya Street. My teachers in the school of drama recitation were Zinaida Diakonova and Nadezhda Budnik. They taught us to recite prose and poems and used hexameters to teach us to breathe. I proved to be good at composition. The composer Maria Zavalishina was head of our music group. Under her guidance I composed music for children's poems.