by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

February 21, 2008

Two Russian-Jewish immigrants now living in Livingston are strongly linked by their past as underground scholars. More than 20 years ago, Marina Goldin — now a music teacher and art school director — and Igor Kotler — senior historian at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan — were part of an underground Jewish intellectual group in their hometown of St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad.

Their participation in the group is captured in a photograph that is part of “Jews of Struggle: The Jewish National Movement in the USSR, 1967-1989,” an exhibit at Beth Hatefutsoth, The Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, through April 30.

Goldin found out about her image on display in the Tel Aviv museum last fall, when the exhibit opened. “A friend called me and said, ‘Marina, I’m here in Tel Aviv and I’m looking at your picture.’” She said she wasn’t surprised the photo was included, since Mikhail Beizer, who formed and led the group, now lives in Israel. (He lectures at the Hebrew University and works for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Jerusalem and is the author of The Jews of St. Petersburg: Excursions Through a Noble Past, 1987, and Our Legacy: CIS Synagogues, Past and Present, 2002.)

As a historian at a museum himself, Kotler said, he was pleased not only with the inclusion of the photo but with the curator’s decision to list the names of everyone pictured. “When you have their names, then the people become real. Otherwise, they’re all nobodies,” said Kotler, who knew about the exhibit in advance but had no contact with the curator.

The seminar began in 1982. Kotler and Goldin were in their 20s when they joined, Kotler in 1983 and Goldin around 1985. The goal was to create a kind of underground graduate seminar on Jewish studies, prohibited at Russian universities at the time. “It was an intellectual outlet,” said Kotler. “To find a circle of people with similar interests whose knowledge was above average for Soviet Jews,” he said, was very important for him; he compared it to “an oasis in the desert.”

The seminar met in members’ apartments, by invitation only, about twice a month. Each member was expected to do original research and then report on their findings. Beizer often led excursions revealing Jewish sites around the city. Goldin, who studied musicology at the university, taught about Jewish music; Kotler focused on Sephardi-Jewish history.

Both Goldin and Kotler learned how to find books on Jewish subjects — but it was never a straightforward undertaking.

“I began buying books [on Jewish topics] in secondhand shops — history, literature, fiction, whatever was available,” said Kotler. “It was not systematic. There were books translated from Yiddish into Russian, like Sholem Aleichem, and I got acquainted with Jewish knowledge and began to learn Yiddish by myself and later Hebrew.”

Goldin said she would go to the library at the Leningrad Conservatory and scan every musicology magazine and the archives of the musical societies, looking for Jewish references, finding tidbits of information. She might come across “a concert of Bach and Beethoven being presented at a Jewish society,” she said. “That’s how I got access to information.” Once, early in her undergraduate career, she stumbled on an article in a German musicology magazine about serious Jewish music research. It mentioned a book that she then found, to her surprise, in the university’s library, and led to her undergraduate work on the history of Jewish music.

In their search for material, they could not rely on librarians for help. As Goldin explained, when she did approach librarians, seeking help locating articles on Jewish music, the answer she typically received (after several weeks of waiting) was, “The topic suggested lacks public and research interest, so the requested materials cannot be given to you.”

The 15 to 20 members of the seminar presented on such topics as the Holocaust, the Bible, and Jewish music and the Krymchak (Crimean), Karaite, Bukharan, Mountain, and Georgian Jews. Other subjects were historic Jewish sites of St. Petersburg, the origins of Jewish surnames, the history of Jewish studies in prerevolutionary Russia, Jewish manuscripts in Leningrad libraries, and Jewish materials in private collections.

The participants contributed to the samizdat (underground publication) Leningrad Jewish Almanac, and some of their research was also published in Israel and Great Britain. Kotler and Goldin, with the help of supportive editors, even managed — between 1982 and 1989 — to publish several articles on Jewish topics in academic journals. Musicologists have credited Goldin (then Vainshteyn) with being “the first modern author who, after long decades of complete silence, re-initiated the study of Jewish music in Russia, back in the early 1980s” (G. Kopytova, “The Society for Jewish Folk Music in Petersburg-Petrograd,” 1997).

Several master’s theses in the United States and Israel cite Goldin’s articles, and the thesis she wrote for her master’s degree (Leningrad Conservatory, 1983) continues to be a source of information for the study of Jewish music in St. Petersburg.

Their seminar was just one part of “a lot of underground activity,” recalled Goldin. “Some people taught Hebrew — that’s where I met my husband. Some people taught about the holidays, and we even had a purimshpiel for adults. There were different kinds of activities.”

Jews not accepted

Neither ever really feared for their safety or their futures. Kotler knew he would not be accepted to study history at Leningrad State University because the department did not accept Jews. Instead, he attended a technical school, which held little interest for him and meant he would not have a meaningful career. Once he became a refusenik, he said, “I had no future there.”

Goldin, who had a supportive and sympathetic academic adviser, managed to write her thesis on Jewish music, but was not admitted to a PhD program. Asked whether she worried about her safety, she said only, “It wasn’t 1937,” referring to the Stalinist period. “I don’t know that anyone was ever killed [for participating]. As for jobs, probably we were silly.”

As a refusenik, Kotler was visited by Jews from other countries, including the historian Martin Gilbert. When he learned Kotler wanted to be a historian, he contacted Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, which created a fellowship for him. “In 1986, with no prospect of getting out, I got a letter from HUC saying I’m accepted as a research fellow,” said Kotler. Receiving the notification, he said, was a person in prison receiving a letter stating, “‘When you get out, everything’s going to be fine.’ But you don’t know the length of your sentence.”

In 1987, Kotler and his family at last left the Soviet Union. He studied at HUC, continued his studies at UCLA, worked for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in Los Angeles and taught Jewish history at UCLA, the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and Moorpark College in California; he settled in Livingston six and a half years ago when he was offered the job of senior historian at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. He belongs to B’nai Shalom in West Orange.

Goldin and her family left the Soviet Union in 1989. She has continued her teaching career as a private teacher of piano and has also taught general music at Girls’ Yeshiva Merkaz B’nos High School in Brooklyn and in the Sunday school of Temple Beth Shalom in Livingston. She has lived in Livingston since 1995 and is the owner and director of the Do-Re-Mi School of Music and the Arts in Livingston.

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