R.I.P., Musya Zilberman
I know exactly what the communists sent away, that is not difficult. I lived alongside her so I know what they wasted. But I’ll never get comfortable with a sense of the creature that would chase her away.
They had her!
G-d gave Musya to Ukraine, she was theirs! And the bastards made her leave?
They were utopians, and they actually expected utopia could arise, that things would be perfect without her!
Don’t think that isn’t evil.
If you are lucky enough to have a light — I got to have her as a mother figure, for goodness’ sake — you know that the closest we can get to heaven on this side of death comes from being in her vicinity … the stupidity that expected good to come from her absence? Do not get comfortable with that. We get tyranny — we know what they did and why, but your life will be darker if the thoughts behind chasing Musya away ever seem famiiar.
Judge the Soviets by how they treated their angels. Their loss was immeasurable, as was our gain.
Rest in peace, Mrs. Zilberman, we’ll never think of you as anything but alive.
(If you would, please familiarize yourself with the disease that took Musya, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy. Here is her obituary, please also note the donation suggestions.)
My daughter is a Mathematician today because of a Soviet Jewish emigre–a professor of mathematics whose official credentials were insufficient for a position in an America university or, for that matter, in the benighted NY school system.
So the brilliant and enthusiastic emigre math professor was reduced to teaching grade-schoolers in a tiny Jewish day school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side founded by a Silk Stocking District rabbi-to-the-rich and funded by his generous and well-to-do congregation. My two younger daughters were fortunate to be her students.
Her name is Anna Muchkina, or “Muchi” as the kids affectionately called her. She was indefatigably cheerful and her enthusiasm for mathematics and love of children were our blessing. With her round shape, unfaltering smile and bright blue eye,s she looked like a Russian nesting doll. Some of the parents found her accent impenetrable but the children had no difficulty understanding her. Her Math Club immediately became the most popular of the after-school programs.
During summer vacation, my two children–one entering sixth grade and her younger sister entering fifth—would pack lunch in the morning and take the subway to Muchi’s apartment in Brooklyn. Together, they would take the subway to Brighton Beach where Muchi spread a blanket on the sand and spent the day swimming and teaching our two tykes math. She refused payment in any form.
Muchi continued to mentor my middle daughter through eighth grade, entering her in math contests and coaching her to win an impressive string of prizes and awards in Citywide and Statewide math contests. Muchi was in the audience applauding my daughter with the rest of us when she won a gold medal at the New York Math Fair in her first year in Stuyvesant High School.
After taking her undergraduate degree at Carnegie-Mellon, my daughter was invited by the Government of Germany to spend a year researching, studying and teaching at the Max Planck Institute. (Max Planck was the first important mathematician to recognize the genius of young Albert Einstein.) On her return to the States for graduate school, she and her parents and my cousin—a math professor at Tel Aviv University had a long chat about Germany. A peripatetic scholar who spends a great deal of time on airplanes in a seemingly continual round of conferencing and teaching around the world (mathematics is a surprisingly social pursuit), my cousin assures me that the German academy has yet to recover from the loss of its Jewish academics some seventy years ago.
Although scores of my immediate relatives, including my paternal grandparents, were robbed, tortured and murdered by Germans, I bear no animus toward a new German generation. Two of my children know German and my youngest, a Biblical archaeologist is learning. (My oldest, a Harvard Bible scholar, has studied both Old German and Modern.) Two of my children have accepted academic scholarships from the German Government for study in Germany funded by German taxpayers. German graduate students visiting New York eat and sleep in my apartment.
Nonetheless, I am assured that a scholar and researcher on the bleeding edge of mathematics or physics or one of several other rarified disciplines, does better to pursue his or her academic passion in tiny Israel than in Germany. Properly so.
Inspiring story. My son and daughter are taught math by a Soviet Jewish emigre too. I think the world of him.
Thanks. Our gain, Russia’s loss.
How about credit to those who made that wave of emigration possible:
1970 Leningrad hijackers, other Soviet dissidents of late 1960′s and early 1970′s, senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, congressman Charles Vanik and all those who voted for their amendment to the Trade Act of 1974.
Neither Musya nor I nor many others would have made it out of Brezhnev’s empire without these people.
And of course Rabbi Meir Kahane, OBM , and his handful of followers that changed the world forever.