They Were Fighters: Oral Histories of Jews Leaving the Soviet Union WITH YANINA KISLER

Description

How does one decide to abandon everything and start over? Around the world, people flee their homelands because of war, famine, natural disasters, etc. But it is much less common for people living stable lives to leave everything behind and move to an unknown land. Most Jews in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s were well educated, had at least reasonable living conditions (by Soviet standards), and were established in their jobs. The only thing they knew about life elsewhere was Soviet propaganda that depicted people starving and dying on the American streets. And yet more than 300 thousand of them walked away from everything they had worked for their whole lives and went into the unknown seeking something they could not have in the Soviet Union—a life in freedom. Based on interviews with over one hundred emigrants, this question, and the topic of this evening’s presentation, is a study of human nature, resilience, and the pursuit of a better life.

Yanina Kisler was one of those people who emigrated from the Soviet Union and came to the United States. She earned degrees at Boston University and MIT and worked in her career as an electrical engineer. After retiring and losing both of her parents, she realized that the stories of those people who risked everything to start over would soon be lost to time. So, she interviewed more than 100 Jews who left the USSR to understand what their motivations were and document their stories before they are lost. Her book They Were Fighters: Oral Histories of Jews Leaving the Soviet Union masterfully chronicles those stories.