Trafika Europe 13 - Russian Ballet

Naum Vaiman

scientific research and development. Among these “principal orientations” (airplane and tank construction, electronics, and nuclear research,) their “percentage” was just off the charts, especially if one counted those of mixed parentage, whom he did not exclude from the “overall contribution”. The official statistics existed only partially, so that he collected the data himself, grain by grain. Sometimes, his fatebrought him(seekandyoushall find) together with Jews who were enthusiastic about this subject and had collected, each in his own field, the vast material (one had detailed, year-by-year, statistics on Heroes of the USSR by nationality, another, a list of the names of all the Jewish officers, from lieutenants to army generals, compiled from publications in Soviet newspapers going back decades). He even asked me to fill out the profile forms on all my relatives familiar to me, near and distant: years of birth and death, places of birth, social class of origin, education, marriage (noting separately if it was an intermarriage; statistics on mixed marriages was his particular hobbyhorse,) service in the army, type of occupation, etc., and to distribute similar forms among my acquaintances. Those who had succeeded in making a career had to be recorded in particular detail. He said that he had hundreds of such filled out forms in his possession. There was something obsessive about his “total immersion” in this theme, forcing one to suspect some sort of a hidden secret. Lena had told me that in ‘53, he was so outraged by the anti-Semitic campaign, that he

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