BELLA ABRAMOVNA SUBBOTOVSKAYA
Translated from the Russian by Roman K. Kovalev, The College of New Jersey, Department of History, Ewing, NJ 08628, USA; e-mail: kovalev@tcnj.edu.
It somehow worked out that, while I lived together with Bella for ten years and then remained in close contact with her for another twelve years after the divorce, we had no opportunity to tell one another about our childhood and days of youth. This is a major oversight that limits my description of Bella as a person, who was the soul of the People's University. However, there is one detail of her childhood I can relate. Beginning with first grade, but perhaps even earlier, Bella had fallen in love with mathematics. She read any book on mathematics that fell into her hands and solved all mathematical problems and exercises in her textbooks. Just imagine Berezanskii's exercise book for 5th Grade — a huge text containing several thousand problems. Bella received this book in September and in October she had a pile of notebooks filled with solutions to all of the exercises found in the text…
