In fact I did study music, but I had always been drawing and painting and would show it to my uncle, who was an architect. Actually when I was growing up I thought I would become, like my parents, either an engineer or a musician. He just retired and became a published writer, all of a sudden-they actually just published his autobiography in Russia-and my mother was and still is a musician and a piano teacher. Levenstein: My father was, until recently, an engineer. Being an artist was a little easier they didn’t care about Jews becoming artists. I should not try to be a lawyer or a doctor, or any other stereotypical Jewish professions, because they would not take any Jews. Levenstein: There was a fairly specific anti-Semitic policy in place, where I pretty much knew that I shouldn’t bother to, for example, apply to Moscow University for most departments there, because I would just not be accepted. Rail: Did being Jewish make things more difficult for you and your family?
I realized how lucky I was to have gotten out just in time because I was exactly at that age when I would have been drafted into the army.
We left the USSR in January of 1980 and I learned about the invasion of Afghanistan while window-shopping in Vienna. When I was growing up, during Brezhnev’s period, it was relatively liberal, but very hypocritical and still potentially very treacherous and violent. Things were opening up to the rest of the world. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was getting published-people were talking about the Stalinist repression quite openly. Matvey Levenstein: Khrushchev was ousted when I was four, so I don’t have much of a memory of his regime, but I remember my parents saying there was a post-Stalinist sense of emancipation and liberation.
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