In Israel, in work, and in love,
a Highland Park artist finds sanctuary

by Marilyn Silverstein
NJJN Middlesex Correspondent

In 1960, when two Russian mutts, Belka and Strelka, soared into space atop a Vostok rocket, orbiting the earth and becoming the first living beings to return safely from outer space, Ruth Lubka was 11 years old, a child of survivors who was growing up in West Hartford, Conn., within the haunting shadows of the Holocaust. The story captured her imagination.

Now, some four decades later, Lubka’s imagination has captured the story. Last fall, Lubka, an author, illustrator, and photographer, published her first book — Pupniks: The Story of Two Space Dogs (Marshall Cavendish), an account of Belka and Strelka’s adventure aboard Sputnik 5. The book, which took her 10 months to write and illustrate, is designed to delight children ages five to eight.

“It was a wonderful story of fantasy for me to involve myself in — sort of escaping the sadness of the world,” the 55-year-old Lubka recalled recently as she sat in her living room in Highland Park. “Being a daughter of Holocaust survivors is not an easy thing. It’s basically that I grew up in a house where I knew there were secrets because my parents were Holocaust survivors. It was a household full of these secrets. My parents were trying to be protective.

“So I’ve always been interested in understanding what was happening beyond the borders of my life,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to ferret out the truth of things. When these dogs went into space, it became a focus for that energy. I became totally obsessed with it, as children sometimes do. It provided a bright focus away from all the sadness around me.”

The bright focus of Belka and Strelka now shines from the pages of Pupniks: The Story of Two Space Dogs. Filled with a sense of adventure, lively illustrations, and fanciful firebird motifs, Lubka’s book traces the Russian mutts’ odyssey from the streets of Moscow to the reaches of outer space and back again. Its colorful pages are crammed with all the facts and facets surrounding the pupniks’ journey — including the fact that Oleg Gazenko, the Soviet scientist who trained Belka and Strelka, was Jewish.

Although Lubka has always kept her hand in art, she began her professional career not as an artist but as an attorney, rising through the ranks to become the deputy chief of staff of the Connecticut Supreme Court.

“I believed that my first mission was to do something my parents could be proud of,” she said. “But I still knew it wasn’t quite right. My heart wasn’t in what I was doing.”

In 1994, a series of health emergencies led Lubka to abandon the practice of law. “I found a great deal of comfort in returning to my artwork,” she said. “It just brought me to one of those moments in life when one thinks about what’s really important. I wanted to do something that really meant something to me. I’ve always been interested in art — ever since I held that box of 48 Crayola crayons in the first grade. It meant so much to me.”

Lubka decided to enter her photographs of America’s Southwestern desert in a competition for an artists’ residency program in Arad, Israel, sponsored by the World Union of Jewish Students — a move that won her a transformative year in the Jewish state. From 1994 to 1995, She lived and worked in Arad, which happens to be the sister city of the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County through Partnership 2000, a program of the Jewish Agency for Israel that links regions in the Diaspora with development towns in Israel.

During that time, Lubka fell in love — both with the ancient oasis of the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve near Arad and with Igor Muraviev, a Russian-Jewish emigre who was working as an English teacher there. He became Lubka’s walking guide as she explored the beauty of the Israeli desert. She and Muraviev married at the end of her year in Arad. Five years ago, they moved to Highland Park.

Solace in Ein Gedi

“I now want to go back to Ein Gedi,” Lubka said. “I found a great deal of solace there while I was making this huge life change. I want to go back to Ein Gedi and work up a story about the nature there and sort of evoke that special place which I always viewed as my sanctuary when I was an artist there.”

At the heart of the book will be Herschel the rock hydrax, an animal character Lubka is developing around “this incredible animal that lives in Ein Gedi.”

“I love this creature,” she said as she sifted through her sketches of the appealing little animal. “Here are all the little hydraxes in the crevices of the rocks. Here’s Herschel, sunning himself.

“I view the entire site as a sanctuary, with all the connotations that come to mind,” she said. “I just connected very deeply with ha’aretz — the land. That was my sanctuary, that place where King David had written his Psalms. That’s sort of the core of what I want to capture. The same animals were there, the same vegetation, the same waterfalls, the same heat, the same rocks. Whatever happened in the world around, this was a place that never changed. I want to recapture that.”

As Lubka makes plans to return to Israel next summer, she keeps busy with her sketches, with her work on a book about growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors, and with her readings of Pupniks: The Story of Two Space Dogs at schools, book stores, and libraries throughout the region.

“This was just a joy,” she said as she held the book, which is dedicated to “my Russian prince, and to heroes, human and canine, everywhere.”

“I was able to reach back into my childhood to pull out something delightful from it,” she said, “to share it with my husband, and to be on a path that makes me happy.”

Marilyn Silverstein can be reached at msilverstein@
njjewishnews.com.