I did many politically risky things and Mother was right to say that if she had not applied pressure on me to leave the country with her, with my blabbering mouth I'd most likely have ended up in a labor camp in Siberia. Thank God she never found out that I'd complained about her religious pressure on me to my teacher. The Soviet Union being a militantly atheist country, such a complaint could have had unpleasant consequences for her. I might even have been forcibly taken away from her and passed on to my father and his second wife. (In my defense, I can only say that I complained to the same teacher that Mother had hoped would bring her husband back, that is, this was a teacher I knew to be decent and sympathetic. Even so, it was stupid and dangerous.) The young woman was very understanding; she nodded and said: “It's her undereducated generation with its superstitions; make allowances for your mother and don't pay attention to her religious poppycock.”

As I approached thirteen, Mother became determined that my Bar Mitzva should be celebrated in the Riga synagogue. I had been against this, and so had Father, but, typically, our objections had been overruled, even though it was he who had to pay for my teacher.

Religious instruction was only semi–legal, if not forbidden outright, and was still sometimes persecuted. The teacher was a funny little middle–aged fellow, with a Leninstyle cloth cap covering half of his face. He always scuttled very quickly along the corridor and into our room, so as not to draw the attention of the neighbors. I remember him warmly, mainly because of the tactful way he tried to calm things down between me and my mother on those occasions when, in protest at one of her never–ending attempts to push me too far and boss me around, I'd refuse to study with him.

Within a few weeks I could read Hebrew, albeit very haltingly, which didn't stop me from trying to assail in the original the first sentences of The Book of Ecclesiastes, whose beautiful translation into Old Russian I already knew and admired.