American Dancer is kicking off a new series. We would love to hear about your hobbies and projects outside of dance—what brought you to them and how you have pursued them. If you have a story to share, please contact Yanina.kisler@comcast.net and American Dancer at americandancer@usadance.org. You can write up your own story or just send us a summary along with how to contact you so we can arrange for an interview.
My name is Yanina Kisler. I started ballroom dancing when I was a graduate student at MIT, and I competed for a few years at that time getting up to the championship level in standard. I took a long break from ballroom when my kids were little and did a bit of belly dancing just for fun. Eventually, my husband (Eric Austin) and I started doing collegiate competitions in the Boston area while our kids were in Hebrew School on Sundays. I have also done some Pro-Am. We have been members of USA Dance since 2016 competing in Open Standard and were United States champions in 2023, and World semifinalists in 2021 and 2023.
Dancers are interesting people. I am always impressed with how accomplished our competitors are in many aspects, not just in dancing. We have met industry leaders, scientists, engineers, doctors, judges, and high-ranking military officers. It has been fun to discover this side of people with whom we change costumes in the dressing area. I am an engineer by training and have worked in the field my whole life, but recently I started a project unrelated to dancing or to my profession.
I was born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1978. I was one of the third-of-a-million Jews who emigrated from the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s up to when the Soviet Union dissolved. Two years ago (I was already retired, and I am dangerous when I have free time), I was looking for some information about those years, and I realized that most of the people who emigrated as adults during that period are now in their 80s and 90s, and soon there will be nobody left to ask. So, I decided to collect the stories of people who emigrated from the USSR, what their lives were like in the “workers’ paradise,” what made them decide to emigrate, their struggle to leave the country, and how they perceive their legacy now, half a century later.
By reaching out to parents of friends and friends of parents, in addition to advertising to various Jewish Russian newspapers in several cities, I was able to find and interview close to 120 people. Most of them were highly educated, had a good standard of living in the USSR (by Soviet standards), and knew nothing about the West other than the Soviet propaganda of people starving and dying on the streets of America. And yet they risked everything, took their children, and sometimes their elderly parents, and went into the complete unknown. Some left to escape unrelenting antisemitism and some left to escape socialism that was strangling the lives of people there. I wanted to see what type of person was willing to abandon everything they worked for their whole lives just for a chance at a life of freedom.
I had never written a book before, and, as my daughters have said, my written English has an accent. So, writing up and arranging the stories of over 100 people in a way that was readable, coherent, and interesting was a challenge. Fortunately, my husband (Physics PhD, but now editor-in-chief, book cover designer, and cheerleader extraordinaire) provided immeasurable help. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet version of history that I learned in the USSR was not quite correct. I had to learn that history anew and present its impact on the people who lived through it.
The book turned out to be a multi-year undertaking, but I was driven by a sense of obligation to the people who talked with me about their lives. They trusted me to preserve their stories for the future so their grandchildren and great-grandchildren could learn from them even when they were gone. Those stories are remarkable in both their poignancy and in their fierce fight for a more positive future. So, I had to bring it to completion.
The book is called “They Were Fighters. Oral Histories of Jews Leaving the Soviet Union,” and it is now available on Amazon.
Yanina Kisler is a Senior III and Senior IV Championship-level dancer. She has been competing together with her husband, Eric Austin, for the last seven years, both nationally and internationally. They were United States Champions in both Senior III and Senior IV Standard and World Championship Semifinalists twice. Yanina is an Electrical Engineer, now retired. She and Eric have two children and three grandchildren.
American Dancer is thrilled that Yanina Kisler will be working on this series. To read more of her American Dancer articles, check out: How to be a Good Spectator at a Ballroom Competition and So, You Want to Compete in a European Ballroom Dance Competition?
