An annotated edition of the story "At the Hour of Dawn", the second part of the trilogy "The Road Goes into the Distance...". The author, Alexandra Yakovlevna Brushtein, began writing this story in 1958. She was already seventy-five years old, and more than half a century had passed since the events described.
Her city, the city of the story (Vilna, now Vilnius) had survived two world wars and the Holocaust during these years, and the world of the story had sunk into the past, perished in the fire of the catastrophes of the 20th century. But the writer managed - with love and encyclopedic precision - to recreate the city and world of her adolescence. All the events described in the book are reliable, each character - regardless of his place and weight in the book - has a real prototype, whose name and surname he bears in most cases. This allowed Maria Gelfond, the author of the comments, to find in the archives not only confirmation of the person’s existence, but also to trace his history, to learn how he lived before, during and after the events described in the book.