Faina (“Ina”) Zilberberg has been a member of Five College Learning in Retirement for 10 years. I knew from her strong accent that she obviously came from eastern Europe but only found out her fascinating and heroic personal story when I interviewed her for this article.
Ina was born in 1935, an only child; her father was a bookkeeper and the family lived in Odessa, Ukraine. Her first language was Russian — she said that Ukrainian was taught in school.
When WWII broke out, she was five years old. Ina and her mother were evacuated to south-eastern Kazakhstan where they spent four years — the climate, she said, was awful, and there were constant shortages of food and clothing. It was so bad that her mother once made her a pair of shoes out of an old coat.
During these four years, Ina was sick with many childhood diseases. At one point she even contracted malaria.
Her father spent all four years of war at the front lines, but did come home. When the war ended, the family moved back to Odessa.
Ina had special aptitude in the natural sciences and studied engineering at Odessa Polytechnical Institute, graduating in 1958. She met her husband, Yakov, also an engineer, and married in 1961; they had one daughter, Márya, born in 1962, who is a physician.
When they still lived in Odessa they were lucky to share a communal flat (with one bathroom and one kitchen!) with 18 other people. Ina says that the building where they used to live in Odessa was destroyed by a Russian rocket during the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.
Yakov was unable to defend his doctoral dissertation back in the Soviet Union because of antisemitism. He finally defended it in the U.S. at age 47.
In 1976, they, along with Ina’s mother, applied for visas to get out of the country. Their heart-breaking waiting lasted five months, but finally they got out.
After six months in Rome, where Yakov could work, they left for Providence, Rhode Island, in January 1977, where they found a warm and welcoming Jewish community.
Yakov was able to get a job three weeks after their arrival. To help support the family, Ina needed to get to work as well. She also needed to learn English in order to work, and simultaneously went to three different places to learn it fast. Around April of 1977, Ina was able to get an interview for an engineering position. She said it was not easy, given her limited English, but she was earning $5 an hour, which, along with Yakov’s salary, allowed them to buy a house for the family.
Yakov got a position at University of Massachusetts Lowell in 1980. In 2009, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died a year later. Ina kept working and taught in many different schools — she adores teaching and is good at it.
She now lives in Leeds, close to her daughter and grandchildren.
Ina is active in Five College Learning in Retirement, taking one or two seminars per semester, usually dealing with her favorite subjects: history, culture and technology.
“I like a good book,” she said, “and I like good people.”