In the early 1950s, my grandmother was a surgeon in Moscow and was saved by her superior, Dr. Nikolay Yelansky OBM. Interestingly, this terror was quite chaotic. The NKVD would simply call the hospital administration office and demand that all Jewish staff report on a given day. Yelansky would warn my grandmother to skip work on certain days and then arranged for her to take an extended vacation. There was no order to this terror, much of it was random. Granted, she was not a prominent doctor at the time. I guess famous doctors could not escape so easily.
"Something I have not considered before. Post-war, Stalin’s campaign, against Jewish doctors. Especially if she lived then in Leningrad. It is plausible that she was a prominent doctor then and she faced a prison or worse. This would also explain why the family moved away."
The soviet family that knew about the suicide probably sanitized the story in their memory or in real time. It's like people who vanished during Stalin days, who knows why they vanished. They just went for a walk and vanished…
And it was the family that grew in fear, after loosing their father Boris.
I know that Jewish doctors all over the USSR were driven out of their mind with fear of the "doctors' plot" crackdown. during that time, my grandmother (she was a doctor, and not even in a huge city where all such dangers were multiplied) left for work every day with a packed “prison bag”, in case she would not be returning home.
In the early 1950s, my grandmother was a surgeon in Moscow and was saved by her superior, Dr. Nikolay Yelansky OBM. Interestingly, this terror was quite chaotic. The NKVD would simply call the hospital administration office and demand that all Jewish staff report on a given day. Yelansky would warn my grandmother to skip work on certain days and then arranged for her to take an extended vacation. There was no order to this terror, much of it was random. Granted, she was not a prominent doctor at the time. I guess famous doctors could not escape so easily.
"Something I have not considered before. Post-war, Stalin’s campaign, against Jewish doctors. Especially if she lived then in Leningrad. It is plausible that she was a prominent doctor then and she faced a prison or worse. This would also explain why the family moved away."
— highly plausible!
The soviet family that knew about the suicide probably sanitized the story in their memory or in real time. It's like people who vanished during Stalin days, who knows why they vanished. They just went for a walk and vanished…
And it was the family that grew in fear, after loosing their father Boris.
I know that Jewish doctors all over the USSR were driven out of their mind with fear of the "doctors' plot" crackdown. during that time, my grandmother (she was a doctor, and not even in a huge city where all such dangers were multiplied) left for work every day with a packed “prison bag”, in case she would not be returning home.