My name is Solomon Volkov, and I was born in 1944 in Leninabad, now Khojent, Tajikistan. I grew up in Riga, Latvia. Riga is a city with history, belonging first to the Russian Empire and then to Germany. It is a highly cultured city. I was immersed in its culture, especially classical music. It is because I was engrossed in music’s beauty that inspired me to create it, as well as expose it to the world. Wagner once directed the Latvian Symphony Orchestra there. While the Germans occupied Riga, he was played constantly, as the Nazis highly admired him. Wagner’s operas were said to reflect Nazi themes and typify Nazi values.
My parents were born in Riga and were Jewish but of very different backgrounds. My mother was from a well-to-do family. I am named after her brother Solomon, who owned a fashion company, known for its buttons engraved with the word “Elegant” on them. Unfortunately, he died fighting in the Russian army during World War II. I have his eyebrows.
My mother attended the prestigious Russian Gymnasium, a progressive school where she developed an affinity for all kinds of modern culture. She often recited poems, to me, from modern Russian poets. It is also from her that I learned to love music.
My father attended a yeshiva where he was motivated to bring about political change. He joined the Jewish Social Democratic Party known as the Bund, which had strong ties to the Russian Social Democrats and believed that socialism could only be achieved “after developing a bourgeois society with an urban proletariat.” (Russian Social-Democrat Workers’ Party, Britannica.com)
My father was very active in political upheavals and was arrested in 1934, following the coup of Prime Minister Kārlis Ulmanis. Ulmanis overthrew the parliament and installed himself as a dictator. My father was a firm believer that the people should run the government and have the right to express themselves and live in an egalitarian society. While imprisoned, he met with other political prisoners with the same political and spiritual beliefs. These people eventually ruled Latvia after World War II. Around 1939, romance also happened during my father’s incarceration. My mother visited him there and eventually arranged to marry him while he was still in prison.
Then, in 1941, the Germans invaded Riga and began eliminating the Jewish population. They shot 30,000 in the autumn of that year, forcing the rest into ghettos. Around November and December, the Riga Ghetto became too crowded, and an additional 30,000 Jews were taken to the Rumbula Forest and shot to make room for the German Jews intended to be sent to the Riga Ghetto. Fortunately, my parents escaped that terrible fate, and in 1941, they left Riga and went to Central Asia.
While in Central Asia, my father left to fight in “the front.” I never learned where he fought; however, I stayed at home with my mother, who, like so many women of the time, was forced to care for me by herself. My father lost a leg in the war and was sent to a hospital in Riga, which had been liberated from the Nazis. In 1945, my mother and I returned to Riga when I was a year old.
My father continued his interest in politics; however, my parents never spoke of this in front of me, unless they spoke in Yiddish, which they did not teach me. They were afraid that because I was young, I could innocently mention something about my father’s political inclinations and land him in jail. It was a very precarious time in the early ‘50s when many Jews were arrested and persecuted.
Tragically, many of my father’s friends were arrested and got long prison terms. My father was saved by the people he had met in prison some 20 years earlier, during the 1934 coup. They were able to protect him from being arrested.
My father worked as an archivist for the State of Latvia. He spoke Russian, Latvian, German, and Yiddish and was given secret material to translate. During the regime of the Dictator, Kārlis Ulmanis, Latvian intelligence was reputed to have the most advanced and effective information gathering in Europe.
After the Russian Red Army took over Latvia, Ulmanis was exiled. He worked as a projectionist at a local movie house. This was interesting for me, as he was humiliated by this work; he was from a well-to-do family.
Perhaps because of my parents’ enforced secrecy, I don’t remember much of my childhood. I attended kindergarten at a school where my mother worked as a bookkeeper. At age six, I went to a special music school. I had been exposed to music from an early age. My mother loved classical music and would secure cheap opera seats for us. She knew all the singers and would follow their careers. I am certain I became a musician because of my mother’s influence. The only drawback to my first year in that music school was it was only taught in Latvian, which I could not speak. I had to learn Latvian. Happily, I did quite easily, perhaps due to inheriting my father’s multilingual proficiency, perhaps because exposure to music had primed my brain to learn new things. I was quite happy in that school. The class liked me, and I felt the same way about them. There were three nationalities of students attending that school. In the classes taught in Latvian, all students were Latvian. In the Russian classes, there were Russians or Jews. Russians in those days did not identify as belonging to any religion and there was no antisemitism in the Russian classes. After that first Latvian year, I was placed in a Russian-speaking class at the same school. Our music classes were taught in both Russian and Latvian. In those classes, which were extremely inspiring, we also had ballet students. This was the school, years later, where Baryshnikov studied.
As for everyday life in Riga during my childhood, we weren’t hungry exactly, but food was far from abundant, and I seldom received treats. My parents would rarely buy me candy, and if I was lucky enough to be given some chocolate, I was allowed just one bite each day so that it would last.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, we were all still vulnerable to the regime in power, which was then Russia. My classmates, many of whom were like me, Jewish, would say the KGB came to their homes and searched for evidence of disloyalty. The KGB also came to our classroom to question us. Given all this, my parents and I lived in fear that they would come to arrest my father. Life was like walking on nails. You never knew who would be arrested and for what reason.
My life turned out to be surprisingly interesting. In elementary school and high school, I learned first to play the piano. My piano teacher, who was Latvian and spoke Russian haltingly, came to my home to convince me to pursue piano, for which he felt I had a special talent. “Play with the pillows of your fingers,” he would tell me, “Not your nails.” I just smiled. We would not be able to afford a piano, and besides, I preferred violin, on which I focused, and went on to study at Leningrad Conservatory. In 1991, when the city of Leningrad’s historical name was restored, it became the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music.
Tragically, my mother died in 1970, six days short of her 61st birthday. While she saw me graduate with honors from the conservatory in 1967, she did not live to see me receive my advanced degree in musicology, conferred in 1971. She did not meet my classmate, Marianna, a concert pianist who became my wife, nor did she learn of my later work as an artistic director, musicologist, and cultural historian.
My father died in 1979, one month shy of his 68th birthday. He died of a heart attack after reading a scathing review in a major Soviet newspaper, of my book about Shostakovich that had been published in the U.S.A. In the review, I was referred to as a “bedbug.” My father was found in bed with a copy of that newspaper.
In 1976, I emigrated to the United States and served as a research associate at Columbia University’s Russian Institute. I have written many books and been blessed to meet and know many extraordinary people, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, pianist Suyatoslav Richter, violinist David Oistrach, and Claudio Abbado, conductor of La Scala in Milan, who was asked to review my book about Shostakovich. Once that negative review appeared, the request was rescinded.
I issued my books thanks to the dedication of my dear wife, Marianna (nee Tiisnekka), whose physical and mental health challenges of the past 20 years have become a tragedy for both of us.
I am enormously grateful to the Alpha Omega-Henry Schein Cares Holocaust Survivors Oral Health Program for supporting me in receiving the excellent care I have received and continue to receive from Dr. Marsha Goldenberg. This care is not only improving the quality of my dental health, everyday life, and ability to eat and enjoy food, but it has also allowed me to connect with Dr. Goldenberg, a caring, accomplished, and beautiful soul.
I am moved by the heartfelt kindness of those who support these endeavors, which aim, in some way, to soothe those who have suffered immeasurable loss. To let us know, perhaps most importantly, that we are not alone is, at my stage of life, vital to the quality of that portion of my life that remains. G-d bless you all!