My Life in Three Countries

By Tamara Gurvits

This is a life story of the person who lived and worked as a professional in three different countries. The author, the third generation of physicians, wrote about her father, a high-level military doctor who had a great influence on her life. She described the life in Siberia with its intolerable cold and shortage of food. She wrote about her study in medical school in Leningrad. After training, author enjoyed her neurological practice and research in the area of stroke. She went through many exams and residency training. She settled in the beautiful state, NH, working at VA Hospital. She enjoyed along her difficult path the friendship and help of many good people. The author extensively traveled from any place where she lived. She wrote this book, in the first place, for three grandchildren.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543472516

Tamara Gurvits

The author was born in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the family of a military physician and was evacuated to Siberia during World War II. She returned to Leningrad in 1944. The author finished medical school and had interesting clinical and research work until her emigration. She enjoyed the great culture of Leningrad: incomparable architecture, art museums, and the ballet. She left the USSR in 1977 and lived and worked for three years in Tel Aviv and Safed, Israel. The author immigrated to the United States and went through multiple exams and training. She settled in the beautiful state of New Hampshire, working at the veterans’ affairs hospital. She enjoyed frequent travels around North Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, and Canada and began her Transatlantic travels in 1994.

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 by Tamara Gurvits. 765482

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017919316

ISBN:   Softcover     978-1-5434-7252-3

             Hardcover   978-1-5434-7253-0

             EBook         978-1-5434-7251-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 03/05/2018

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DEDICATION

For Victor and Anna Gurvits, my parents

and for their great grandchildren

Anna, Avital and Ezra Victor Gurvits

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1

Leningrad (St. Petersburg), USSR

1. About My Papa

2. Papa’s Role in Our Lives

3. About My Mama

4. Early Age

5. Our Life in Siberia

6. School Years

7. Medical School

8. Our Dacha (Country House) in Shuvalovo

9. My Personal Encounters with Anti-Semitism in the USSR

10. My Professional Life in Leningrad (USSR)

11. My Son’s Childhood and Teenage Years in Leningrad

Chapter 2

Israel

12. Our Life in Israel

Chapter 3

Professional Life in the United States of America

13. The Preparation for Professional Life

14. Michigan

15. New Hampshire

16. Dr. Roger Pitman in My Research Life

Nonprofessional Life in the United States of America

17. Wandering Jew

Boston, Massachusetts

Louisville, Kentucky

Back to Boston

Traverse City, East Lansing, Coldwater, Michigan

18. New Hampshire

19. North Fort Myers, Florida

INTRODUCTION

The idea to write about the past came to me when my son ordered a book dedicated to the descendants of the Gurvits family from sixteenth-century Spain where there was a village by this name. In this book, the author presented short biographies of people with a variety of spellings of Gurvits. After I read all the biographies, I realized that my father, with all his accomplishments, deserved to be included in this book. I thought to send a biographical sketch of my father to the author for the second edition. It took some time before I began to write. Gradually, the project developed in length. I wrote about Mama and Papa, and because I have three grandchildren, I decided also to describe my life, forty-three years of which I lived in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Russia. My oldest granddaughter said that she is interested in her family roots. The two younger ones don’t understand yet what the past means. But when they will be old enough to understand, I will not be around to tell them personally. But I hope they will read my labor of love with interest.

CHAPTER 1

Leningrad (St. Petersburg), USSR

1. About My Papa

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Grandfather, Samuel, whom I never saw

My papa, Victor Samuelovich Gurvits, was born in 1899 in Kiev, Ukraine. He mentioned that as a little boy, he went to heder (a Jewish school for boys). I don’t remember him ever talking about his childhood or his family. According to Mama, he had a brother and a sister. It seems to me that Papa’s family was a forbidden topic. Mama told me after my persistent questions that they were in Siberia. I didn’t know if they were alive or dead. After my emigration from Russia, I learned about Stalin’s deportation and repressions and assumed that my father’s family was deported to Siberia. Papa was a military professional, and he must have had to hide this fact or denounce his family. I can’t blame him for this decision, as it was an issue of physical survival for all of us. One tiny piece of the past, a beautiful antique vase, was kept on the top of the piano. Mama told me that it was a present from my grandfather, who owned an antique shop in Kiev a long time ago. (It was actually a part of a chandelier.)

In 1918, during the Civil War, Papa joined the Cavalry Corps under the command of the famous Marshal Budenny. I don’t have the slightest idea about his life before 1918. It is strange to me now to think that I never asked him about his past. He kept his cavalry spurs, and I took them with me when I was leaving Russia and carried them through my wandering across the world. They are now ninety-eight years old, and I gave them to my grandson, Ezra Victor, to keep. Papa remained in the military service after the Civil War. He went through training and became a pharmacist. In a book of biographies of the high-level military physicians, it is written that he worked in the pharmacy of the military hospital in Kiev. I know more about his career and life after 1927 when he met my mama during his vacation (otpusk). He saw her, a girl of nineteen, on the streets of Zhitomir, Ukraine, and asked somebody to introduce them. They were married one month later. When his vacation was over, he took Mama to the small town of Kushka, where he served in the border’s military forces. Kushka was located in the desert on the border with Afghanistan, the most southern point of the USSR. Mama described it as a hell with very hot winds from the desert and numerous attacks of Basmachi (Muslim rebels). From that time, they formed a lifelong friendship with two couples in Kushka. One male friend was a dentist and another—a surgeon. I had some dental treatment done by his friend, who later moved to Leningrad with his wife and daughter. I found Mama’s letter from Kislovodsk Sanatorium where she asked me to say thank you to Nadejda Romanovna and Josef Abramovich Schkolnic for their care.

Papa applied for admission to the Military Medical Academy in 1930. He said that all his preparations for the entrance examinations were done during the long trip on a slow-moving train from Kushka to Leningrad. The main help during the entrance exams, as he told, were the pages from the textbooks he had hidden in his clothes. He finished the academy with high grades.

I was born in 1934, when my father was in his last year of the academy. Mama had already finished four years study at the Financial-Economical Institute in Leningrad. After graduation, Papa was assigned to an air force unit that was stationed in Gatchina, a remote suburb of Leningrad. He served as a senior physician of a special reconnaissance unit. Mama, the nanny, and I stayed in Leningrad, but we joined Papa during the summer months. While serving in the Air Force Division, Papa had to jump with a parachute during the flying exercises. He received a medal for accomplishing a specific numbers of these jumps, approximately six hundred.

We lived on Kuybishev Street in the Petrograd District, one of the most beautiful old districts of Leningrad. There were many gardens, old mansion houses, and the Neva River nearby. The former spacious apartments (of the rich or not so rich) were converted into the communal apartments. Several people coexisted in one room, and there was only one kitchen and bathroom for all the families to share. Very few families had two rooms. Doctor Zhivago, a novel by Boris Pasternak, vividly describes the housing conditions after the revolution. Papa received a big room (twenty-five square meters) from the academy, a luxury for two people at this time. When I was born, a nanny joined our family, and four of us shared the same room.

Papa became a deputy chief and, later, a chief (Nachalnik) of the very big military outpatient clinic that served all servicemen in the Leningrad District. I remember the clinic, a beautiful red-brown building near the Michailovskiy Castle. Papa was a talented administrator, very demanding but caring, and he was very loved by his staff.

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Papa, a military physician, in 1938

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Papa’s Medical Diploma from Military Medical Academy, 1934

During the period of 1939–40, Russia engaged in a short war with Finland called the Winter Company. This specific winter was extremely cold. Papa served in the position of deputy chief of the Eighth Army Medical Department under Colonel Frolov. In 1967, I spent the thirty-day vacation at the Military Resort in Zelenogorsk (Green City), on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, thanks to Dr. Frolov, who was a director of this huge sanatorium. Russia had a handsome gain of the territory from Finland when the war was over. The beautiful small towns became some of the favorite resorts of the population of Leningrad. Papa returned, as a chief, to his outpatient clinic.

I remember that during the Finnish War, we had two big rooms by the time my sister, Jenya, was born on February 19, 1940. After the war, Papa moved us to a private apartment on the beautiful street of Tchaikovsky, almost at the corner of the Liteyney Prospect. There was a formidable gray building of the NKVD (KGB) on the corner. Very few families could enjoy their own kitchen and toilet at that time, albeit the fact that ours were tiny and without windows. Our two rooms were very beautiful. They had tall windows from some special glass and marble windowsills overlooking Tchaikovsky Street, old oak herringbone parquet, and beautiful French doors; the ornamental ceilings were five meters high. Our apartment was made from the ballroom, and the entire beautiful house was once a mansion of the tsar’s fur supplier that was converted into an apartment building. It was three stories high and had wide marble stairs.

We lived in walking distance of the River Neva and the famous Summer Garden. The Officers’ Club was located on the corner of Liteyney Prospect and Kirochnaja Street, which was only a fifteen-minute walk. The Officers’ Club played a very important role in our lives: I started ballet there at age six. There was a huge library with an extensive children’s department. Mama, who was an avid reader, enjoyed this library as much as I did. I read a few books a week when I was six. I don’t think that Papa ever went to this library. His readings were the newspapers. But we didn’t have many, just the Pravda and Izvestia.

I remember (or Mama told me?) that after the Finnish War, our family enjoyed life. My parents often went to the theater because Papa had special tickets. Mama was always very elegantly dressed. Our nanny now slept in the tiny kitchen, not in the same room with my parents. The good life soon came to an end. On June 22, 1941, Germany began the invasion of Russia.

Papa evacuated us in July 1941 with a group of families of the high-level administration of Leningrad. It was assumed that it would be a short parting; consequently we didn’t bring enough clothes or household items with us. We were settled with local families in Galich, an old Russian town. The Germans were moving very quickly toward Leningrad and Moscow, and during the fall, all families were relocated to Siberia.

Papa served in the same position for a short time. A close friend of our family, Nadejda Romanovna, a dentist, a friend from Kushka, worked in Papa’s outpatient clinic. She told us that when the siege of Leningrad began, the conditions of life became tough, and food was scarce. Papa demanded that all the women in the medical service wear lipstick and have their hair done (to lift their spirits?).

Papa was appointed as chief of the medical department of the Twenty-Third Army soon after the beginning of the siege. This army’s mission was to defend the area north of Leningrad. The Twenty-Third Army commander in chief was General Verhovsky. My papa, Colonel Gurvits, had twenty hospitals under his command along with the multiple field mobile medical units close to the front lines. The administration department under his command consisted of the chiefs of services for each medical specialty: neurosurgery, surgery, internal medicine, etc. These medical chiefs were mostly professors from the military academy who specialized in a military trauma medicine as well as being experts in their specific fields. I still remember some of them. Papa’s friendship with these doctors continued long after the war. His connections were numerous. When he had to find the best doctor for us or his friends, he knew who to contact.

During the war, Papa was always moving between different units and hospitals, often under artillery barrage or bombarding. His personal driver, Kovalenko, who served with Papa through the whole war and sometime after, told me that Papa was very courageous.

I remember some names and people from this wartime period very well. Our family was friendly with a senior gynecologist, Professor Dimshits. I received three wonderful volumes of Pushkin’s poems in antique edition from him. Professor Frenkel, chief of neurology, took me in his department for training in 1959. There was a long friendship with General Shamanin, the member of military committee of the Twenty-Third Army. Later, he wanted me to marry his son. General Alecksandrov came to our apartment for dinner a few times. It was interesting to mention that in the summer of 1945, our family and the family of the chief of SMERCH (military counterintelligence) of the Twenty-Third Army, Colonel Kantorovich, who also was Jewish, were settled together at a farmstead located in former Finnish territory with two soldiers caring for us.

The siege of Leningrad was lifted on January 27, 1944, and in May, Papa sent his adjutant (aide-de-camp) to Siberia to bring us back to Leningrad. Periodically, Papa was able to drive from the front, which was in close proximity to Leningrad, to visit us for a few hours. I remember that during one of his visits, the artillery bombardment resounded nonstop in the distance. He left immediately for the front in the middle of the night. It was the beginning of the offensive on the city of Vyborg in Finland. There were a lot of wounded, and the hospitals had to be ready for admission and treatment.

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Papa in 1943

My father was a colonel through all of World War II, despite having the responsibilities of a general-level position. He was recommended for a promotion for the rank of a general four times, but it never materialized. In the book Jews in the Wars through the Centuries, there are multiple examples of similar cases. There was written that from 1943, Stalin gave an unofficial order not to give Jews high-level decorations and not to promote them to advanced ranks, except in the special cases. Despite these recommendations, Papa had multiple decorations, including the highest—as of Lenin, of the Red Banner, and the Red Star, etc. Father’s portrait as a chief of medical service of the Twenty-Third Army is on display in the Museum of Defense of Leningrad and in the Military Medical Museum.

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Papa in 1944 with his favorite chauffer, Kovalenko

On May 9, 1945, Russia celebrated victory over Germany. Papa was not with us as the army moved toward the north, and his visits with us became more complicated, but a car and a chauffeur were at our disposal. We were taken to the Marsovo Field (a military field next to Neva). I remember the cannon salute of victory: Mama held my sister, and I was on the shoulders of the chauffeur. The salute was unbelievable; hundreds of the cannon rounds were fired that evening. Everybody thought that from that time on, our lives would be just full of happiness.

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Papa in 1945. This portrait is on the wall at the Military Medical Museum in St. Petersburg

A part of the Twenty-Third Army was moving toward the Far East for the war with Japan. Papa was promised that he would finally receive his general rank. But he stayed behind with the section of his army in Karelia. One year later, the demobilization of the Twenty-Third Army was accomplished, and Papa applied to be decommissioned from the army for medical reasons. He retired from the army at age forty-six and became a colonel in otstavka (retired colonel). He was a wise man and saved our lives by keeping a low profile. After the end of the war, a lot of high-ranked people, mostly Jewish, perished in one of Stalin’s paranoid campaigns—composers, writers, artists, and doctors. In 2008, I bought a book, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, and it became clear to me how it all happened. I was a child when the war was over. Unfortunately, I never asked Papa to describe his experience during the war. When I became an adult, I was too busy with my own affairs. Now I am so sorry about this, but it is too late.

After the war, Papa worked as chief of the medical department at the academy of the air force under General Aleksandrov, who was his superior in the Twenty-Third Army. I remember him very well; he was a very handsome, huge, good-natured man.

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Father with the family in 1946

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Papa in 1946

At some point of time, after he was over fifty years old, Papa took a six-month course in radiation therapy, at the GIDUV (Institute of the Advanced Education for Physicians.) He worked for a while in this specialty and enjoyed the clinical experience. When he retired completely, he knew he could always earn some money working a few months during the summer as a substitute in the radiation departments. When he was well over seventy, he traveled from the suburb of Leningrad, Pushkin (now Tsarskoye Selo), to Leningrad by electric train to the hospital every day.

Intellectually, Papa never changed. He was always sharp and never had any lapses of memory. He spent his free time listening to the Voice of America, BBC, from Germany—Svoboda/Freedom, and playing chess with his few friends. Each summer, he rented an apartment in Pushkin. When not working, he and Mama would go to Aleksandrovsky Park every day by bus. There were many cozy benches on the hill under the shade of the old trees, and this was a gathering place of the pensioners. Many of them were the survivors of Stalin’s camps (gulag). They had their stories to tell. It was good for my parents to be with company every day and to converse and reminisce. I am sorry that I never was there to listen.

Papa’s favorite toy in retirement was a shortwave radio, Grundig, which at the time cost an amount equal to the cost of a one-bedroom apartment. Unfortunately, a lot of his time was spent standing in line for the food, which was not available regularly in the store, and almost everything, even rotten apples, were not available. He often would come home from the food lines agitated and would continue to talk to an imaginary offender, saying, You were a guard in a concentration camp!

He was often ill with heart and liver problems during his last decade of life and was hospitalized. He had excellent self-discipline in regard to his diet: no sweets, no fat, no eggs, no alcohol, and was very careful with salt. Farmer cheese, buttermilk (kefir), buckwheat cereal, lean chicken, and very lean ground meat prepared as cutlets (similar to hamburger but mixed with white bread) were in his daily menu. He periodically fasted for two to three days, when he ate only apples or kefir to lose weight. It all helped. It was fortunate that as a colonel in retirement, he and Mama had a month of treatment every year at the military sanatorium in resort city Kislovodsk with its crisp cool mountain air.

Zoya Mitrophanovna Andreeva, the mother of my friend, Natasha Lasko, exclaimed, Gurvits! Are you a daughter of Colonel Gurvits? when she met me for the first time in Boston in 1981. I replied, Yes. She told me that during the war, she served in the Twenty-Third Army as a surgeon. The physicians during this time graduated within four years, mostly as surgeons, and were sent to the front-line hospitals. She told me how she met my