Very interesting article about Olga Kostritzky

I find more interesting her recollections and thoughts about when she left Russian and came to the US, especially the part about the recorded music in the ballet room.

'We left everything'
The move from the Ukraine town on the Black Sea to America may have seemed like a risky move at the time for a pair of artists who didn't speak English. They had a comfortable middle-class life in Odessa, a nice apartment and cars. Her husband, Ilia, played in the Odessa Philharmonic Orchestra, a job that allowed the couple to traverse the far reaches of the Soviet Union, bringing back exotic toys and fox fur coats for their daughter.

"The reality was life in Russia in the '60s and '70s was so limited in terms of what you could read and the information available to you," her daughter, Angela Kostritzky-Haws said in a telephone interview from her home in Westchester, New York.

"They knew that there was more out there. They wanted to be able to read what they wanted to read and not having that option, as artists, I think pushed them to leave."

The exit from her homeland is a topic Kostritzky would rather not discuss except to acknowledge that her Jewish heritage on her mother's side certainly made matters more difficult.

Leaving the Soviet Union in the Cold War era was notoriously difficult, especially for Jews, and often was perceived as an act of treason. Applying for an exit visa could mean severing ties with employers and family and paying multiple fees long before a visa was granted.

Many families like Kostritzky's relocated to Italy after getting their exit visa while waiting for a U.S. visa to come through. Working through an agency, they were eventually placed in Buffalo, where they had a distant relative.

"When I look back, it's like you can't swim. But in the middle of the night you jump in the ocean just thinking, 'Maybe I'm going to get to the coast and my life's going to be better,'" Kostritzky said.

"I don't know, maybe because we were young. When you're young you think you will never die, everything's going to work, so this is what we did. We left everything."

A lack of English skills hindered their ability to find jobs, so Kostritzky said she and her husband took language classes at the University of Buffalo. But she immediately started seeking opportunities to teach ballet.

Her English teacher gave her the address of Buffalo's Royal Academy of Ballet and Dance, where Kostritzky saw for the first time a ballet class accompanied by a tape recorder instead of musicians. In exchange for the opportunity to teach, the director offered her private language classes with a dance student.