Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

==== 2021–2022: WAR, EXILE, AND WEAPONIZED MEMORY ====

===== The Invasion of Ukraine (February 2022) =====

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a rupture in the post-Soviet order. Western institutions sever cultural ties. Russian artists face bans and exile. State propaganda intensifies.

Within this geopolitical convulsion, the Gershovitz legacy fractures again.

====== In Russia: Full Co-optation ======
* The Russian government launches a "Cultural Defense Campaign", urging artists to “preserve the homeland’s aesthetic sovereignty.”
* Yakob’s early folk arrangements and Israel’s pro-revolutionary poetry are used in propaganda broadcasts and military recruitment videos.
* A new state ballet, Franka: Flame of the Motherland, premieres at the Mariinsky. It shows Franka as a Bolshevik heroine who dances through enemy lines with a red banner. The music is “inspired by Yakob”—though no original scores are used.

Key distortion: The family’s Jewishness, dissidence, and repression are erased entirely. They are reborn as perfect Soviets, devoid of complexity.

====== In the West: Counter-Curation ======
* The Gershovitz Digital Archive, maintained by descendants of Irina Rozanova in Berlin and Toronto, launches a fully bilingual, open-access platform with hundreds of original manuscripts, unreleased scores, and oral histories from surviving students.
* Ukrainian cultural institutions, especially in Lviv and Kyiv, publish articles highlighting Israel’s suppressed Jewish identity, noting that he had once tried to visit Ukraine in 1944 to bear witness to the Holocaust by bullets—and was refused.
* A London gallery curates an exhibition called “Elegies for the Silenced: Yakob G. and the Echoes of Eastern Europe,” positioning the composer alongside Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian modernists.

In the diaspora, the Gershovitz siblings are increasingly seen not as “Russian” at all—but as part of a broader post-imperial, transnational story of survival and resistance.