Soviet Jewish Oral History Project Western Reserve Historical Society Interviewee: Boris Kolker Interviewer: Svetlana Kurinsky Date of interview: August 27, 2014 Location of interview: 6755 Mayfield Road, Mayfield Heights Svetlana Kurinsky: Today is August 26th of 2014. My name is Svetlana Kurinsky. I am at the home of Boris and Esther Kolker. Thank you very much Boris to be with me today and to give your history. Let’s begin the interview. Could you please introduce yourself? [Russian speech] Boris Kolker: Hello Svetlana. My name is Boris Kolker, and…I was born on July 15th in 1939 in Tiraspol, Moldova in the Soviet Union. Now it is the capital of Transnistria. We arrived in Cleveland on June 10th, 1993, and finally our family reunited here. We came here from Ural Mountains, and our daughter started in Moscow. She was married there, and she remained in Moscow. Here it’s only our family, my wife Esther Kolker, daughter Isabella Blyumin (Kolker), son-in-law, Ilya, or Leo Blyumin, and grandchildren, Alex and Eugene, and finally our two great grandchildren, Adam and Matthew. Currently I am retired. Here in Cleveland I worked as office manager at the company Magic Micro Computers, and also as a freelance translator. For higher education, Moldavian State University in Kishinev and I have Ph.D. in linguistics from Institute in Linguistics at Academy of Sciences of USSR in Moscow. SK: Wow. Alright, can you tell us about your life in the, you know, Moldova when you were young, about your family? BK: Yes…my parents came to Kishinev in 1940 when it was added to Soviet Union. Previously they used to live in Tiraspol, Moldova too, but generally they came from Ukraine, from city of Balta. All our huge extended family is from Balta. It’s interesting; my birth certificate says that I was born in Tiraspol, Moldavian Autonomic Republic, Ukrainian Republic. So it is in Ukrainian language, birth certificate Ukrainian and Russian. SK: Interesting, wow. So your parents heard this, and then they moved for some reason to Moldova. BK: Yes to Tiraspol, which was at the time capital of Moldova, autonomous Moldova. Yes, my father Gersh, or Grigori, he was…he was an artist. He was an artist, a decorative artist. SK: He was a painter? 1 BK: Yes, he was a painter. And…he didn’t have higher education; he…had hardly high school, hardly. Because at that time it was really hard to get education, but he was very talented, and he also had very broad horizon of knowledge. He read much and he knew mostly writers from abroad. He knew them, and the…market in Kishinev after the war it was possible to buy many things of interest for very cheap. He bought…magazines from the beginning of the century, and so I learned to read at six year old, and I read these old magazines, old books, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, old volumes before the revolution. SK: Wow. BK: With the old Russian alphabet. Six year old reading. Yes, and we had a lot of books for the time. Not just in Russian, we had books in Yiddish. Yes they were published before the war, and after the war it was time, yes. And my mother Fanya, she thought it was… she had higher education. She grew up in very poor conditions that her mom gave her to orphan home and then she wanted to study. She went to Kharkov and studied there in commercial college. And she became…a specialist and economist and then in many years she was teaching, teaching a special subject…merchandise science in schools. She taught tens of years in Kishinev. SK: In secondary schools? BK: No, no, in special schools. SK: Oh, in special skills. BK: Yes in special schools. SK: So like a specialized school for people who wanted to go into merchandising? BK: Yes. SK: Technikum. BK: Yes. SK: Coming from an orphanage and a poor background… BK: Yes. Because her father was killed in 1919 civil war and the mom had several children, no money, it was terrible. Yes, so we lived during the World War Two our family, the father was at the war. SK: So he went to war? 2 BK: Yes, he was drafted. Our family moved to Uzbekistan. From there, we returned in 1944, to Kishinev. In 1944 when Kishinev was liberated, we came back to Kishinev. I was told that my father had not only much knowledge, he knew much, he also had some critical attitude to the existent power. He liked to joke and sometimes the jokes were political. My mom, who was a member of a communist party, she told…shut up everywhere. Yes, somebody could hear it. SK: She spoke Yiddish at home? BK: At home they spoke Yiddish and Russian. And my mom wrote letters to her mom only in Yiddish. So I have a collection of Yiddish letters. SK: That’s beautiful, and she kept in touch with her mom? BK: Yes, her mom used to live in Odessa. And also her sisters and distant extended family lived there in Odessa. And also, you probably don’t know this expression. When people were not happy with the actions of the government and they said in Yiddish A melikhel. It means, “What the government?” SK: Yeah, I don’t know that expression. BK: “What the government?” I graduated from high school number three; it was a famous school in Kishinev, an old part of Kishinev. We used to live there. And then…because I tried to…go to the local university and for the first time I wasn’t accepted. SK: Because you were Jewish? BK: Probably. They didn’t tell me. I had four admission exams there. Perfect in four, and in one good, I wasn’t accepted. And so next year I went to Tirapol, to a provincial college, a teachers college. So I was accepted there, and there I met my future wife, Esther. And later we moved, both to Kishinev. We graduated from this university with red diplomas. We were not accepted the first year, and we graduated with perfect red diploma. SK: With honors? BK: Yes with honors. And then when we looked for a better job, and better conditions to live. Because we lived with our parents, and it wasn’t enough space, then our daughter was born. I looked for a better job, and found a good one far away in frosty Ural Mountains, in Bashkiria in a teachers college, as a senior teacher of linguistics and French language. I graduated with French and Russian language, two majors. I changed jobs several times. We moved to the small town of Birsk, then in two years to the capital, [where] I worked also in a teachers college. Esther worked at the Aviation 3 Institute, because she was a mathematician. Then she worked to teach high school mathematics, and physics, and special classes for special students in math. SK: Gifted and talented students? BK: Yes. For two years I worked as an interpreter with the French automobile company Renault. They constructed an engine factory for the car “Moskvitch.” I worked there with them as an interpreter. Then I became translator. I moved to Institute of Oil and well logging. There I worked for twenty years as head of translation service. So we moved here in 1993. That is the life in that country, work, and study, and family and Esperanto. This is my hobby and occupation for all my life. When I was a student, I learned the international language Esperanto. I was so interested in this, that it became my main hobby. I took part in the movement. The language was forbidden in Stalin’s times, you know, international relations, spies. But after this dictator died, it became legal. I taught it, and took part in the movement. We organized camps and clubs. It was a very interesting life for young people. Esther, me and our daughter Bella were going to camps all over the country. At the time, people almost didn’t move. They stayed in their cities. In 1960 I took a huge trip from Kishinev to Moscow. I stayed there, then to Tallinn, then to Tartu, then to Esperanto camp, then to Leningrad, then to Kishinev. Today, it is almost around the world. SK: That probably took you all summer. BK: Probably three weeks. No so much. Then I wrote Esperanto textbooks for Russian people, and then international textbooks. In 1963 there were conventions for Esperanto that happened in Bulgaria, in Sofia. In Bulgaria, these people were close to the local government, and they asked the Soviet Central Committee of Communist Party to send a group. Never had Soviet people taken part in this world convention. People were excited to go there, they were mostly from Moscow and Leningrad. They were old people, members of the party. I wanted to go too. But, you know, I had some “sins.” I was not a member of the communist party, I was too young, only twenty four years old, I was provincial, and finally I’m Jewish. There is hidden anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Because of Esperanto I was interested in learning several languages. It helps to learn several languages, and also linguistics. Just then they begin the first attempts at machine translation. I studied this and did my work in algorithms to translate from Russian to Esperanto. SK: You wrote an algorithm for a computer? BK: Yes. It didn’t mean that it was tested there.