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

=== Memory, Dissonance, and the Shape of Legacy ===

==== - 1959: The Soviet Union opens its doors to limited Western exhibitions and cultural exchanges. ====
* 1961: Khrushchev denounces Stalin more openly at the 22nd Party Congress.
* 1962: The Novocherkassk massacre reminds everyone the thaw has limits.
* 1964: Khrushchev is ousted; Brezhnev begins to consolidate power.
* 1968: The Prague Spring is crushed, and Soviet liberalism hits a wall.

In this fraught decade, artists and intellectuals tried to balance truth and survival—the lifelong theme of the Gershovitz children.

==== In 1961, as part of Khrushchev’s official “rehabilitation of early revolutionary figures,” Israel’s name reappeared in Soviet literary circles. A “selected works” anthology, Verses for the People, was published in 1963. ====

The volume, edited with political caution, included:
* His early pre-revolutionary agitprop verse (glorifying the proletariat)
* Carefully selected wartime elegies (focusing on “the Soviet people,” never Jews)
* Omitted entirely: his private Holocaust cycle “Night Without Flags” and anything overtly religious, ethnic, or disillusioned

Still, he was invited to speak at the Writers’ Union Conference of 1965, where, instead of reading his old verse, he surprised the hall by reading a new poem titled “There Is No Synonym for Absence.”

It was met with stunned silence, then hesitant applause.

He died quietly in 1966, blind in one eye, surrounded by notes he had never dared publish.

Franka said at his funeral:

: 

==== By 1960, Yakob’s name had begun to circulate again—not in official programs, but in samizdat music journals, university recitals, and underground composer collectives. A small cult of musicians, many of them trained in Moscow or Leningrad Conservatories, saw in him a Soviet Charles Ives: buried genius, overlooked innovator, victim of ideological conformity. ====

The 1961 “Private Premiere” of his Symphony No. 3 at a Leningrad cultural club—technically unauthorized—drew nearly a hundred people, including several foreign musicologists. The performance was recorded on reel-to-reel tape and smuggled to the West via a Czech academic. It would eventually reach Paris, then New York.

Back in the USSR, Yakob was both amused and wary. When a graduate student asked why he hadn’t pursued rehabilitation like Prokofiev, Yakob replied:

: 

In 1964, a small Soviet publishing house offered to reprint one of his early folk arrangements—under his name. He refused. He began instead composing a final cycle: “Studies for a Deaf Government.” It remained unfinished at his death in 1968—found beside his bed, written in pencil, the paper spotted with tea stains and blood.

==== Retired in 1957, Artur remained a Party member in good standing. In the Khrushchev years, his former role in the NKVD was a liability, not a merit. He sensed the change and withdrew entirely from public life. ====

Yet, he retained influence behind closed doors. His contacts in the Ministry of Culture occasionally reached out for quiet “clarifications” on historical matters. Artur always obliged—with redacted memories, expunged dates, and silence where it mattered most.

In 1962, a rising official asked him whether a certain Yakob Gershovitz was “related” to him. Artur responded:

: 

In truth, Artur and Yakob had not spoken since 1953.

He died in 1965 of a stroke. At his funeral, Franka did not speak. Yakob did not attend.

His will contained no mention of his siblings. But tucked into a file labeled “Misc. Archives” was a sealed envelope addressed to “Whoever Still Remembers.”

Inside: a full copy of Israel’s banned manuscript Night Without Flags.

==== Franka outlived them all. ====

By the early 1960s, she had become an informal mentor to a generation of Soviet ballet dancers disillusioned with the stale heroic tableaux of Brezhnev-era stagecraft. She taught quietly, with precision, and rarely mentioned her own career.

But those who studied with her remembered something else: the way she moved through memory.

She choreographed three new pieces in this decade—all of them brief, lyrical, wordless:
* “Salt in Spring” (1960), dedicated to her brother Israel.
* “Ash and Ribbon” (1963), danced once by her finest student, then banned.
* “Lullaby for the Hollow Stage” (1968), performed in an empty auditorium, filmed by a Czech documentary team who were expelled days later.

By 1968, she had become a kind of living reliquary of Soviet cultural pain—a dancer who never defected, never denounced, and never published.

When asked in an interview if she regretted not leaving the USSR, she said:

: 

==== In 1967, a French ethnomusicologist published a monograph titled “La musique oubliée: Yakob Gyorgi Gershovitz et la Russie déformée” ("Forgotten Music: Yakob Gershovitz and Distorted Russia"). It caused a stir in émigré circles and brought Yakob's name—briefly—into the Western avant-garde consciousness. ====

An LP of his reconstructed Symphony No. 3 was released in Paris in early 1968. It sold poorly. But among the dissident diaspora, it became legendary.

Back in Moscow, the LP was passed around like contraband. A copy made its way to Franka. She played it once, alone.

Then she shelved it behind a photo of the family taken in 1910—Rosa and Moishe standing beside four children who did not yet know what they would become.

==== The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 crushed the dreams of many. For young Soviet artists and writers who had come of age during the Thaw, it was a brutal awakening. ====

Some were arrested. Some defected. Some simply fell silent.

For Franka, it was another turn of the wheel.

She choreographed one final solo: “Study for One Step Forward, Two Back”. It was never performed.

She kept dancing in her apartment—until the arthritis made even that impossible.

Would you like to continue into 1968–1978, as the Brezhnev era descends into stagnation—and memory begins to matter more than politics? Or would you prefer a narrative story drawn from this quietly momentous decade?