Despite the frigid Soviet landscape, my Jewish spark was set aflame

As told to Riki Goldstein by Mrs. Suzzanah Fain

I

was studying in the university in Sverdlovsk  in the early 1970s, and it was in the depth of a Russian winter when a fellow university student called Eduard Finkelstein asked me, “Suzzanah, do you want to know about Chanukah?”

I had no hesitations. That shiur about Chanukah became my first Jewish learning experience. Together with another ten students, I joined the local activist group for a shiur, and I saw a menorah for the first time in my life. How many menorahs were there in this distant Russian city? After that first exposure to Judaism, I knew this was what I wanted, and I attended more classes. Yet it was very dangerous.

Soon after I joined, the KGB started to summon members of the group for questioning, and one member was arrested and imprisoned. People stopped coming — only three of us newcomers were determined to stay involved despite the risks. But I didn’t care. This was my entry to another life.

My Jewish roots were strong, despite the frigid Soviet landscape of my childhood. Like my mother before me, I was born in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest city, east of the Ural Mountains. Both my mother’s parents were from Dvinsk, home to Rav Meir Simchah HaKohein, but their families were forced by the Germans to leave before World War I, and they wound up almost 3,000 km away, in Yekaterinburg.

In hindsight, the forced move saved their lives. My grandfather had a sister who wanted to return to Latvia, and she and her husband left Russia and went back to Dvinsk in the 1930s. We never saw them again.

When the Germans invaded Latvia, the community of Dvinsk was the first to be annihilated, and there were barely any survivors. In 1941, my grandfather would go to the railway station daily, because many Jews were coming, fleeing Latvia, though they were mainly Jews from Riga, who had some time to flee. His sister never came. My mother had the last picture she sent, with the news that they had grandchildren, and I have given the picture to Yad Vashem.

My grandmother told me that when they arrived in 1914 some of the locals came out to look at them and asked where their horns were. I presume that is what they had heard in church, or perhaps the lasting impression made by the Michelangelo statue had reached them, because Yekaterinburg was a city full of art and culture.

My grandparents were both around 17 when they came there, and their families were almost the first Jews to settle in Yekaterinburg. Almost, because there were a few old Jews living there, descendants of the “Cantonist” Jewish children who were forcibly abducted to serve in the Russian army during the 19th century. Some of them still knew they were Jews, despite their fathers’ abduction at age 12 and the 25 years of service. In fact, I had one Jewish friend who was from a Cantonist family.

In 1917, three years after my grandparents’ arrival, Czar Nicholas and his family, the last Romanov rulers of Russia, were murdered by the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg. The Communist Revolution changed the face of Russia, and the city was renamed Sverdlovsk. My grandparents married, and my mother and her siblings were born in Soviet Sverdlovsk.

While my mother was growing up in Sverdlovsk, my father, Moshe Rozhansky, was being raised in an observant family in Kishinev, which is today Moldova. That area was historically Romanian but was ceded to the Russian Empire at certain points. The Russians grabbed it back from Romania in the 1940s, during World War II. They forced all the young men to enlist, but they couldn’t trust these young capitalists to serve in the army, so they had to work behind the lines.

Papa was sent to work in the city of Chelyabinsk, just 200 km south of Sverdlovsk. The labor conscripts traveled by train from Moldova to the Ural Mountains. To get food and water, you had to get off and buy it in the stations along the way, but you could never know when the train would start moving again.

At one stop, the train was already moving when Papa came back, but he managed to jump on. He was making his way back to the front of the train, where his suitcase of clothing was, when someone called “Mussa, Mussa!” (a variation of his name) and began to speak to him. After sitting and speaking a while, he returned to his original carriage to find that bandits had boarded the train, stolen everything, and injured the passengers. So he arrived in the Urals whole, but without any clothing or possessions.

Papa was a very gifted musician, and soon, when there was a choir competition being held among the Russian labor battalions, one of his superiors, who recognized his talents, asked him to arrange a choir. Russians were very invested in choirs and music, and of course, they were very competitive.

“You must come in first place,” the commander warned Papa. They did, and he was delighted. Since he was a music lover, and he understood my father’s caliber, he suggested Papa apply to study in the music academy in Sverdlovsk.

The music students there were refugees from all kinds of places, and some were Jewish. Word was passed around that there were some Jewish families in town who would share food, and so Papa came to my grandparents’ home, where my grandmother would not mix milk and meat. Not that there was milk or meat then; it was wartime, and all that was available in Sverdlovsk was potatoes.

The refugee students didn’t even have potatoes, and Papa had sores on his face from hunger. My grandmother served soup — it was a soup she cooked with potatoes and beets and wild herbs. And there my father met my mother, then a medical student, and they married. His mother, who had been forcibly evacuated from Kishinev to central Asia, did not believe that her son could have found a Jewish girl out there in Sverdlovsk until he showed her their kesubah. I have that kesubah still, a small piece of paper, signed and witnessed as a kosher marriage.