Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

=== The Gershovitz Legacy in the Age of War and Memory (2018–2024) ===

Inheritance, Disinformation, and the Fight to Remember

==== 2018–2020: GHOSTS IN THE ARCHITECTURE ====

By the end of 2018, the Russian state had firmly positioned the Gershovitz siblings as icons of a selectively sanitized heritage. Meanwhile, a digital underground, especially among young artists and émigrés, pushed back with increasingly bold reinterpretations.

===== Key Events =====
* 2019: A new Russian state history curriculum includes a chapter titled “Soviet Art Under Pressure: Strength Through Suffering”. A sanitized version of Yakob’s Symphony No. 3 is used as an example of “overcoming dissonance through national devotion.”
* 2020: A New York dance collective, led by the granddaughter of one of Franka’s original students, stages Iron Flowers using AI-generated choreography derived from Franka’s journals. The performance goes viral on TikTok under #GhostOfFranka.
* 2020 (Russia): The Ministry of Culture hosts a Centennial Exhibition on “Russian Spiritual Modernism,” prominently featuring Yakob and Franka—but not Israel. A single placard mentions: > “The siblings overcame their personal and ethnic heritage to serve Soviet greatness.”

Their Judaism is rebranded as an obstacle. Their survival becomes proof of patriotism.

==== 2021–2022: WAR, EXILE, AND WEAPONIZED MEMORY ====

===== The Invasion of Ukraine (February 2022) =====

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a rupture in the post-Soviet order. Western institutions sever cultural ties. Russian artists face bans and exile. State propaganda intensifies.

Within this geopolitical convulsion, the Gershovitz legacy fractures again.

====== In Russia: Full Co-optation ======
* The Russian government launches a "Cultural Defense Campaign", urging artists to “preserve the homeland’s aesthetic sovereignty.”
* Yakob’s early folk arrangements and Israel’s pro-revolutionary poetry are used in propaganda broadcasts and military recruitment videos.
* A new state ballet, Franka: Flame of the Motherland, premieres at the Mariinsky. It shows Franka as a Bolshevik heroine who dances through enemy lines with a red banner. The music is “inspired by Yakob”—though no original scores are used.

Key distortion: The family’s Jewishness, dissidence, and repression are erased entirely. They are reborn as perfect Soviets, devoid of complexity.

====== In the West: Counter-Curation ======
* The Gershovitz Digital Archive, maintained by descendants of Irina Rozanova in Berlin and Toronto, launches a fully bilingual, open-access platform with hundreds of original manuscripts, unreleased scores, and oral histories from surviving students.
* Ukrainian cultural institutions, especially in Lviv and Kyiv, publish articles highlighting Israel’s suppressed Jewish identity, noting that he had once tried to visit Ukraine in 1944 to bear witness to the Holocaust by bullets—and was refused.
* A London gallery curates an exhibition called “Elegies for the Silenced: Yakob G. and the Echoes of Eastern Europe,” positioning the composer alongside Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian modernists.

In the diaspora, the Gershovitz siblings are increasingly seen not as “Russian” at all—but as part of a broader post-imperial, transnational story of survival and resistance.

==== 2023–2024: MEMORY AS A POLITICAL ACT ====

As war drags on and disinformation grows more sophisticated, memory becomes an act of defiance.

===== AI and the New Misinformation =====
* Deepfake videos circulate showing Franka performing for Stalin at a fabricated 1943 gala—meant to glorify “unity between artist and state.”
* A right-wing American influencer misquotes Israel’s early poetry to support a talking point about “Western decline,” drawing outrage from scholars.
* State-backed Russian bots flood YouTube with “explainer videos” simplifying Yakob’s work as “proto-nationalist art” and accusing the West of “corrupting his legacy.”

===== Countermeasures =====
* The Gershovitz Trust (established by Rozanova’s great-niece) begins watermarking and timestamping verified materials. They publish a statement: > “These works were made without permission and preserved against silence. They belong to no state. They belong to truth.”
* A Moscow underground zine called Фантом (“Phantom”) begins publishing excerpts of Israel’s censored poems alongside essays about Yakob’s unreleased scores.

In the final issue before the editors are detained, one page simply reads:

: You want them as saints. They were survivors. You want them as weapons. They were warnings.

==== 2024: ANNIVERSARIES, AMBIGUITIES, AND A CHOICE ====

This year marks:
* 90 years since Yakob’s blacklisting
* 100 years since Israel’s first poem was published
* 80 years since Franka last danced a full solo

A large state-sponsored concert is announced at the Grand Kremlin Palace:
* Titled “The Resilient Note: Russia’s Artistic Triumph,” it promises orchestrated performances of Yakob’s “most patriotic works” and “never-before-seen” dances inspired by Franka.
* Invitations are issued to Western dignitaries. A promotional trailer includes stock footage of Russian tanks and ballet side by side.

Simultaneously, a network of underground studios, digital archivists, and émigré artists coordinate an international counter-event titled “Ashes Without Applause.”
* The event spans six cities—Warsaw, Kyiv, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Toronto, New York.
* No new works are created. Only existing pieces are performed—unaltered, unadorned, and in their full original complexity.
* Franka’s Unmarked Movements is danced by a Syrian refugee in Berlin.
* Yakob’s Elegy for Stravinsky is played in Kyiv, in a school once shelled during the war.
* Israel’s Night Without Flags is recited aloud in a synagogue in New York—accompanied by silence.

No press covers it in Russia.

But the livestream is watched by over 300,000 people.

==== WHAT REMAINS ====
* In Russia: The Gershovitzes are icons without nuance, used to validate a new empire’s myth.
* In exile: They are symbols of refusal, of complexity under pressure.
* To those who still remember: They are neither saints nor slogans—but the ongoing answer to a single question:

: Can art survive not just oppression—but resurrection in the hands of those it once warned against?

Would you like to continue into the near-future speculative decade of 2024–2034? Or would you prefer a narrative story—a moment in time—drawn from this age of fractured memory and digital ghosts?