Avram Hershko was born in Karcag (Hungary) in 1937. In 1950 he settled in Israel, where he studied medicine at Hebrew-Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem from 1956, obtaining also his Ph.D. in 1969. Dr. Hershko worked several years in San Francisco before returning to Israel at the Technion. His pivotal work that described the discovery of the ubiquitin system was granted with several prestigious awards, including the 2000 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (with Ciechanover and Varshavsky) and the 2004 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (along with Ciechanover and Rose).

I was born on December 31, 1937, in Karcag, Hungary. Karcag is a small town of around 25 000 inhabitants, about 150 km east of Budapest. It had a Jewish community of nearly 1000 people. My father, Moshe Hershko, was a schoolteacher in the Jewish elementary school in Karcag; most of the Jewish children in that town were his students. His former students from Hungary, and later from Israel, described him with admiration as an inspiring teacher and a role model educator. My mother Shoshana/Margit (‘Manci’) was an educated and musically gifted woman. She gave some English and piano lessons to children in Karcag. My older brother, Chaim, was born in 1936, less than 2 years before me. My mother wanted very much to have also a girl baby, but the times were at the eve of World War II, Hitler's screams could be frequently heard on the radio, my parents became apprehensive of the future and thus did not try to have more children. Still, my recollections of my early childhood are of very happy times, with loving and supporting parents, growing up in a nice house with a beautiful garden, created by my father who was also an amateur (but avid) gardener.

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