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  • Victor Yefimovich Kelner, 1945–2021 (ז״ל)
  • Benjamin Nathans (bio)

Most accounts of the revival of Eastern European Jewish studies since the collapse of communism focus, understandably, on the scholarly works it has generated. But one can also trace its effects by looking at the lives and careers of those who produced that scholarship in situ, in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. No life captured that revival more vividly for me than that of Victor Yefimovich Kelner, who was felled by COVID-19 in St. Petersburg in February 2021 at the age of seventy-six. He was my closest friend in Russia and an unforgettable mentor to me and many other younger historians.

Quite a few people born in the USSR in the year 1945 were named Victor or Victoria. Kelner’s father Yefim (Chaim) had been severely wounded while serving as a Soviet army officer, and like nearly everyone in his generation, Jewish or otherwise, the Soviet triumph over Nazism in the “Great Fatherland War” became the defining event of his life. Victor grew up in the shadow of that war, and of another, mostly cold but no less present, especially in the realm of culture and humanistic learning. As a Soviet border guard (see fig. 1), Victor served on the Cold War’s front line before completing his undergraduate and graduate degrees in history at Leningrad State University. His scholarly interests at the time were comfortably within the USSR’s acceptable limits: a dissertation on the early history of the British labor movement, and a book and a slew of articles on the history of publishing and the book trade in late Imperial Russia. This being the Brezhnev era, it was understood that Jewish topics were off limits, though it’s not clear that Victor’s inclinations were pointing in that direction at the time.

By 1989, when we first met, that was beginning to change. A mutual friend introduced me to Victor as someone with insider knowledge of Russian imperial archives who might be willing to help an American graduate student navigate their mysteries, starting with the people who worked in [End Page 228] them, their unwritten rules, and the ways to get around them. In those days there was almost no publicly accessible information about Jewish holdings in Soviet archives, let alone information you could access with a few clicks on a computer. You showed up with a topic and some hunches and hoped for the best; success depended in no small measure on cultivating relationships with locals, including archive staff members.


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Figure 1.

Viktor Kelner as a Soviet border guard, ca. 1965. Photo from the personal collection of V. E. Kelner.

One day I mentioned to Victor that a staff member in the manuscript division of the enormous State Public Library—or “Publichka,” as it was affectionately known, prior to being renamed the “Russian National Library” in 1992—was unusually friendly. In contrast to the typical gruffness of such interactions, she actually smiled when going over my daily requests for this or that file. “She’s the most dangerous of all,” came his reply, a Party member whose job included keeping a dossier on foreign researchers. After I despaired of being able to decipher the anarchic handwriting of An-sky, the turn-of-the-century ethnographer and author of The Dybbuk, Victor showed up unannounced in the reading room, sat down next to me, and showed me how to identify patterns in individual letters, eventually moving to words, and finally to whole sentences. In the apartment where he lived with his wife Yelena (a chemist) and their son Stanislav, I found a home in Leningrad. Their building was on a street named for Mother Teresa, which seemed odd given Soviet ideological proclivities. Or at least that’s what I thought, until Victor informed me that the street (“ulitsa M. Tereza”) was actually named for the French Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez. Thus was a running joke born.

The few foreign scholars who had previously researched Jewish subjects in Soviet archives had usually done so under the guise of a different (and innocuous) topic. Conversely, there were scholars...

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