“I wish I could go back in time and whisper in my parents’ ears, ‘Don’t worry. It will be all right,’” says Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov, the couple’s filmmaker daughter who is making a documentary film about her parents’ struggle and suffering.
Today, there’s not a trace of despair or bitterness in Sylva, nor in the worlds she creates on canvas. How is that?
She explains: “In my work, there is no prison theme. It is a heavy topic, which I don’t touch when working on my paintings. But I remember in the beginning. My first portraits were marked by a deep sadness with a fair share of suffering. Later, the feeling of freedom, love of life in all its expressions – which I had been deprived of in prison – poured onto the canvas. That is why my favorite topics are portraits, flamenco, the animal world…”
Sylva Zalmanson first came to the attention of the world in 1970, when she, her husband Edward and the other “refusenik” defendants (two of them non-Jews) were put on trial for the aborted hijacking escape attempt, charged with high treason. In the Leningrad courtroom, confronted by a panel of Communist judges, the verdicts were a foregone conclusion, but the play-by-play drama was told to the world media by sympathetic observers.
Young, beautiful, fearless, and the only woman in the dock, Sylva was ordered to stand and state her case. She proclaimed: “If you would not deny us our right to leave Russia, this group wouldn’t exist. We would just leave to Israel with no desire of hijacking a plane or any other thing that’s illegal. Even here, on trial, I still believe I’ll make it someday to Israel. This dream, illuminated by 2,000 years of hope, will never leave me. Next year in Jerusalem!”
The Communist court, unmoved by this statement, was infuriated when Sylva went on to recite, in Hebrew, Psalm 137: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning.”
In a story for Studio Magazine, Israeli visual artist Pesach Slabosky wrote, “The prosecutors called her first, thinking that they could break her, and then the men would follow suit, but when she took a defiant posture, the men could do no less.” Two of those men, Edward Kuznetsov and Mark Dymshits, were sentenced to death by firing squad.
It’s worth asking: How bad was it, really, for Jews in the USSR? It was legal to be born Jewish and to die Jewish. It was only illegal to live Jewish, which meant violators would be visited by the KGB and punished. “Unofficial” illegal activities included: attending synagogue, learning Hebrew, studying Torah, celebrating Jewish holidays, eating kosher food, circumcising baby boys, reading or owning “Jewish” books – even fictional ones such as Leon Uris’s Exodus. Jews who objected to being national scapegoats, targets for beatings and worse, were denied exit visas to leave the country. Jews who merely applied for such permissions were considered traitors, enemies of the state, put under KGB surveillance, harassed, ridiculed, not accepted into universities, fired from their jobs, arrested, put on “show” trials and imprisoned in the Gulag network of Soviet forced labor camps.
The trial was broadcast around the world, creating furious street protests in America, Europe, and Israel, triggering an international outcry from 24 governments, the Vatican, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, 35s Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry, the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and world leaders such as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir – resulting in the two death sentences being commuted to prison terms, other prison terms shortened. This was a defining moment, a pivotal event for Russian Jewry, seeing the free Western world fighting for them. Before, in the 1960s, only 3,000 Jews were permitted to leave Russia for other destinations. After the Leningrad Trial, from 1971 through 1980, a total of 347,100 Jews emigrated (163,000 going to Israel), according to the Cambridge Survey of World Migration.