Yanina Kisler – Author of They Were Fighters
Yanina Kisler emigrated with her parents from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1978. She completed high school in Brookline, Massachusetts. She double majored in physics and engineering at Boston University and went on to earn a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT. She worked as an engineer doing research for 35 years. She has also had a successful career with her husband as a competitive ballroom dancer, twice winning the National Championship and twice placing in the semi-final in the World Championship in the International Standard dance style. She also ran a small business for 20 years coaching math teams at a local elementary school. Her math teams won National Championships almost every year. Yanina has two daughters and three grandchildren.
Upon retirement, Yanina volunteered at charitable organizations that focused on projects supporting Jewish life in areas of the former Soviet Union. Many of these activities became impossible with the Russia invasion on Ukraine, so she started looking for other project, After the passing of both of her parents, she realized that she had never had a detailed discussion with them about their own early lives and experiences as Jews in the Soviet Union, and that the generation of people who had made the decision to emigrate from the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s are now in their 70s and older, and their stories will be lost if nothing is done to preserve them. So she decided to start a new project of her own to interview as many of those people as she could find to collect and record those stories.
In addition to the preservation of these histories, she wanted to understand what led these people to take the risk of applying to leave the Soviet Union. Most Jews in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s were well educated, had at least reasonable living conditions (by Soviet standards), and were established in their jobs. The only thing they knew about life elsewhere was Soviet propaganda that depicted people starving and dying on the American streets. In addition, the Soviet government viewed people who wanted to emigrate from the USSR as enemies and traitors, and they faced the danger of being arrested, exiled, or, at the very least, losing their jobs and being socially ostracized. And yet a third-of-a-million Jews walked away from everything they worked for their whole lives, left friends and family behind, and went into the unknown seeking something they could not have in the Soviet Union—a life in freedom.