R.I.P., Musya Zilberman
In 1979, Musya and Alex left Kiev’s unfreedom for the United States to give toddlers Anna and Slavik a joyful life — they were members of a first wave of Russian Jewry that fought through the curtain. As with all immigrants, refugees, they did not have anything material required for survival. They had resolve and not anything else, and not English.
Help came from Beth El Synagogue and the Jewish Federation of New London, Connecticut. A small amount of help, and the debt was quickly repaid: Musya was soon the identified heart and sweat of Beth El Synagogue and the Jewish Federation.
Here, the shopping list for continuous need generally includes two children and no English; she understood this and quickly removed the latter challenge from her life. And two children was tough, but she learned it did not require all she had. She made a clean house, made it warm and fed the family, and there was still time in the day. A new acquaintance, Irene Schienberg — a single mother with two children on a nurse’s salary — did not have any more time in the day, so Musya used her extra moments to be a second mother to Irene’s Susan and Jonathan.
And there was still more time before nightfall.
I believe Musya wasn’t driven by an affection for hard work, few are, but to live the fullest day that time would allow.
At the Jewish Federation, Musya spent three decades resettling Russian Jewish families in the United States. Any member of them will answer that Musya is the reason they are free and perhaps alive, and that is not exaggeration intended for a more gushing remembrance.
She raised their kids, too. She raised me — my brother and I spent half our youth in her trailer-sized house. Usually when visiting, we met a new refugee whom she was housing in her basement, where she had partitioned a warm bedroom.
She did their papers, found them jobs and English tutors — often my mother — as that was her job description. After hours, she worked off the clock. She brought their kids to soccer, to the movies, she brought them air conditioners in the summer.
She soon had perfect English. She traveled to Israel and back to Kiev to save others.
Her daughter Anna today has two beautiful daughters and a husband, a job, and a beautiful middle-class life. Slavik, in a move too pithy for an after-school movie, is now an accomplished biomedical engineer crafting … artificial hearts. (I know, it’s too on-the-nose. I’ve discussed it with him.)
Her last three years were horrible. But they were marked by a steady stream of those who owed her a debt coming to her bedside, and by heartbroken Alex, who was with her every single day, and I’m told that even last week he still was the only person on Earth who believed Musya might yet recover. He really did.
She is no longer with us as of Tuesday.
Many Russian immigrants came to mourn at her funeral. I had not thought much about what the Zilbermans fled from, but their faces and her death and my greater awareness of the Soviet state have brought new awareness of my revulsion for it.
All the people Musya helped: their stories are largely defined by how they responded to bastards who didn’t deserve the same air to breathe — and I cannot stand this. Their stories should not have a dark interloper. The Russians’ time and spirit – Musya got them out and they live wonderfully now, but I can’t stand it: their younger time and spirit! All that damned waste!
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.