Sara's Century

The podcast closes with a reunion between Sara and her father’s long-lost family. Laurie’s husband Bob Weinberg, grandson of Sara’s aunt, lived in Moscow in the early 1980s, and he became like a son to her. When she emigrated to the U.S. in 2001, he and Laurie took her into their home in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. They also helped Sara find her cousin Moritz Mebel, a prominent surgeon in Germany whose family severed relations with Sara and her in 1934. In her 80s and 90s, Sara was finally able to cross some of the bridges created by time and space.

Sara’s fight with the Soviet bureaucracy to be allowed to move with her mother to the Moscow cooperative apartment they not only paid for, but helped build is the subject Episode 11. Their “palace” was a single room with its own kitchen and bathroom that they lived in until Sara’s mother’s death in 1973. Soon after, Sara found a new and loving companion when she married her older cousin Victor Belinkov. New episodes are available every Wednesday from August 1 to October 17, 2018.

The Red Army may have led the USSR to victory, but Stalin’s paranoia about internal enemies spurred xenophobic attacks in the war’s wake. Episode 10 shows how Sara and her mother were targeted during postwar antisemitic policies and the bogus charges against Soviet doctors. Sara and her mother succeeded in keeping their kept their jobs, however, and Sara found satisfaction and pride in her work as a seismologist. New episodes are available every Wednesday from August 1 to October 17, 2018.

In the ninth episode, we see how Sara and her mother made it back to Moscow, but not before Sara had her own #metoo moment in her new job as a Cheremkhovo social welfare inspector. Although their barracks and all their possessions had been destroyed during the war, Sara and her mother shared the general elation over the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany. New episodes are available every Wednesday from August 1 to October 17, 2018.

This episode looks at the life that Sara and her mother managed to make for themselves another 900 miles further east in the mining town of Cheremkhovo, where they wound up only after Sara explored a remote Buryat village accessible in the winter only by horse, boat, and sled. Often hungry, Sara found work in a Cheremkhovo meat- processing factory and was soon promoted from line worker to supervisor. New episodes are available every Wednesday from August 1 to October 17, 2018.

How the German invasion upended Sara’s life is the subject of Episode seven. Having stayed in Moscow until Stalin ordered a general evacuation in October 1941, Sara and her mother had their luggage stolen during an aerial bombardment just as they mounted a crowded freight car to Novosibirsk with fellow evacuees. When they exited the train after a month-long trip, they were left to fend for themselves in the Siberian winter. New episodes are available every Wednesday from August 1 to October 17, 2018.

Episode six examines Sara’s experiences after her father’s second arrest, as she faced the stigma of having a parent labeled a traitor and then suffered abandonment from family members and friends. Although Sara resumed high school and acted as though nothing were wrong, her shame and fear determined both her future education and career. New episodes are available every Wednesday from August 1 to October 17, 2018.

In this episode, we hear Sara’s story of her father’s arrest in early 1934 and his subsequent exile to Kazakhstan. Just as Sara and her mother were preparing to move from Moscow and join him in the city of Alma-Ata, the secret police took him away again. Sara and her mother lost him forever, never learning of his fate. New episodes are available every Wednesday from August 1 to October 17, 2018.

Episode four looks closely at Sara’s parents, socialist sympathizers from Orthodox Jewish families who went down a secular path to take part in the Soviet Union’s great experiment. As a nurse-midwife, Sara’s mother epitomized the USSR’s “emancipated woman.” Though his seven siblings escaped to the West, most of them to the United States, Sara’s father stayed put and worked as an economic planner for the communist regime. New episodes are available every Wednesday from August 1 to October 17, 2018.

The Mebel family’s move to the outskirts of Moscow in the late 1920s and the life they shared in one room of a crowded barracks with no indoor plumbing is the focus of Episode three. Although it sounds like poverty and hardship made for a difficult existence, these were the years Sara counted as her best because her family was still whole. New episodes are available every Wednesday from August 1 to October 17, 2018.

In episode two, we learn of the deadly pogrom in Sara's Belarusan town when Sara was just 12 days old. Like many Soviet Jews after the Bolshevik Revolution, Sara's family left the Pale of Settlement, where Jews had been confined since the late 18th century, for Russia proper, moving to Saratov and then Astrakhan during Lenin’s “New Economic Policy.” New episodes are available every Wednesday from August 1 to October 17, 2018. http://sarascentury.blogs.rutgers.edu/

In the introductory episode, we meet Sara Mebel, Russian émigré and family member of Laurie Bernstein who created this oral history. Though Soviet socialism opened many doors to her, Sara paid a price when her father became a victim of Stalin's Terror. Sara was a loyal Soviet citizen, but open antisemitism after the USSR's collapse drove her from her homeland forever.