Aleksey Vysotsky family name Vysotsky
Biography
Childhood
Alexey Vysotsky was born in Kiev into an educated Jewish family. His father was Volf Shliomovich Vysotsky (born 1889 in Brest-Litovsk— died 1962 in Moscow) immortalized as "Velvl" in a song by his nephew Vladimir Vysotsky), who was from a family of glass blowers. Volf had studied in a commercial school in Lublin from where he moved in 1911 to live in Kiev and study at the Kiev branch of the Odessa commercial institute contemporarily with the Soviet journalist, playwright, and short story writer Isaac Babel, then studied with the faculty of law of Kiev University.  During Lenin's New Economic Policy he organised a workshop for manufacture of theatrical make-up and a law office. Alexey Vysotsky's mother, Dora Ovseevna Vysotsky (née Dora Ovseevna Bronstein, the foster daughter of physician to the Kremlin, Lev Grigorievich Levin) was born 1891 in Zhytomyr and died 1970 in Kiev. She was the birth daughter of a deceased teacher at the state Jewish school, and finished her coursework to qualify as a physician's assistant (Feldsher) and worked as a pharmacist, and subsequently as a cosmetician. In 1926 the family relocated to Moscow; after the divorce of his parents Alexey Vysotsky initially lived in Moscow with his father, but beginning in the 1930s relocated to Kiev with his mother.
During his school days Vysotsky was friends with Gulya Korolova and Alyosha Pyatakov (the son of Georgy Pyatakov, who was tried for anti-Soviet activity, sentenced to death and executed in 1937), his memoirs were included under the pseudonym L.J. Prajs in Elena Ilina's book "Fourth Height".
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