The Soviet Union was a country fueled by contradictions. The majority of the population were poor, while members of the ruling party and the KGB didn’t want for much. Food was often scarce, and regular citizens ate a lot of potatoes, while government officials dined on fine cuisine. Alcoholism rates were astoundingly high, and families were ravaged by the effects of the disease, but everyone received the same education, and literacy rates were also very high. Religion was forbidden, but superstition was a huge part of life for most people.

Historically, there is an East/West dichotomy, in which Russians who saw themselves as “cultured” tried to adopt as many Western customs as they could, while unconsciously holding on to traditions and ways of thinking that are much more Eastern. Major cities reflected this duality. St. Petersburg was modeled on Paris, with its streets and canals lined up on a grid, buildings reflecting French architecture, and statues in baroque and neo-classical styles. Moscow, which grew in circles around the original Kremlin duchy, and which is full of beautiful Russian Orthodox churches with their mosque-like, domed cupola roofs, reflects a distinctly Middle Eastern sensibility.

My mother’s family were from a tiny Jewish settlement in Belarus, and my father’s family from a small town in Ukraine. We were not, by any stretch of the imagination, European. As a matter of fact, being Jews, we owed our ancestry to the Middle East. So, we too participated in the East/West dichotomy, with our roots in the East, but our imaginations reaching for the West. My parents, like so many others in their circle, considered themselves Western, and so the console piano was given pride of place in our apartment, and I was consigned to several afternoons per week of lessons.

I hated it from the very first day. My teacher, whose name I have blocked from my memory, as one does with childhood traumas, wasn’t a kind or gentle musical educator. Those early lessons consisted of her trying to either stretch my very small hands to reach a full octave, or banging my individual fingers on the keys in an effort to force them into correct position. Fingers should be placed on keys at the top of the finger just between the nail and the actual pad. The fingers must curve, while the palm hovered over the keys, the top of the hand staying flat. The bottom pad of the palm must never touch the piano. And so on, and so on, and so on. My fingers were soft and weak, wobbly as cooked noodles! My hands were lazy, wanting to rest on the piano, rather than hovering menacingly over it. And, my feet didn’t reach the pedals. In short, I was hopeless.

Nevertheless, I kept up with my piano lessons for the next five years, graduating from scales and arpeggios to melodies, which grew in complexity as my skills grew. Not that I had a choice, but from what I’ve been told, I actually got to be a pretty good pianist, even getting accepted to a conservatory when I was in the fourth grade. Several times per week, after school, I would get on a bus and travel to another part of Leningrad to spend two hours in preparation for the recitals and concerts before boarding another bus to head home. I learned piano pieces by Mozart and Bach, sonatas by Beethoven, and Chopin, and all manner of other classical works, all of which I despised, but all of which I played with a fair amount of proficiency to the great delight of my Western-aspiring family.

One of the few bright spots in the whole “we’re leaving Russia and going to America” announcement by my parents was that all those piano lessons would have to stop, or at least be suspended. There was some talk about whether or not it would be feasible to ship the piano to wherever we would end up, but ultimately it was determined that this idea was impractical. I was very pleased.

My first year of school in the U.S. was the sixth grade, during which I didn’t have any reason to think about the piano, what with learning a new language, trying to fit into the basic social structure of middle school, and becoming a teenager. However, at the beginning of seventh grade, I somehow found myself joining my school’s orchestra. They didn’t need a pianist, and most other instrument sections were also full, but they did need more violas. I had no earthly idea what a viola was. It looked like a violin, and I was familiar with that, so when I was offered a chair in the viola section, I joined.