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

=== A Life in the Margins of Movement ===

===== - In 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia crushed the Prague Spring, signaling the end of the Khrushchev Thaw. =====
* The 1970s ushered in a period of “stability,” marked by cultural conformity, aging leadership, and quiet decay.
* Dissent became more dangerous—but less romantic. Most dissidents were arrested quietly or placed in psychiatric hospitals.
* Jewish emigration became a cause célèbre abroad, and an embarrassment for the state. Exit visas were rare. Antisemitism grew more coded but remained potent.

In this atmosphere of glacial repression, Frankhezka—a nearly forgotten figure from the revolutionary and wartime ballet—faced her final decade of work.

===== After the invasion of Prague, Franka sensed the door was closing for good. Artists she knew were exiled, silenced, or vanished. Choreographers who had embraced abstraction during the Thaw were returned to the patriotic fold—or expelled from it entirely. =====

Franka stopped teaching officially in 1969.

That year, she choreographed one final piece—“Unmarked Movements”—for a private performance in a Leningrad studio. Only six dancers saw it, and it was never recorded.

It was a piece in ten gestures:
# A woman walking in a circle, dragging one foot.
# A slow unfurling of arms and then stillness.
# A child reaching for a hand that isn’t there.
# A slow crawl backward.
# A moment of suspended breath.
# A sudden collapse, immediately recovered.
# A spinning in place, slowly accelerating.
# A salute that melts into an embrace.
# A step forward that ends in silence.
# A bow—not to applause, but to memory.

When asked what it was about, she said: “It’s what’s left when no one claps anymore.”

===== In 1970, Franka was visited by Irina Rozanova, the musicologist who had rediscovered Yakob’s symphony. Irina, now working on a suppressed monograph about Jewish Soviet composers, asked if Franka had any of Yakob’s surviving scores. =====

Franka said yes—and led her to a closet where she had carefully hidden three tin boxes:
* Yakob’s String Quartets (1947–1950), unperformed
* Israel’s unpublished Holocaust cycle Night Without Flags, copied in Franka’s careful handwriting
* A full handwritten score to “Iron Flowers”, including Franka’s personal notations from its original staging

Irina was stunned. She asked if she could take the materials to Leningrad for safekeeping.

Franka refused.

: 

They spent five days together, copying page after page by hand and typewriter. Irina wept over Israel’s verses. Franka did not. She had no tears left.

===== By the mid-70s, Franka was a quiet rumor in Moscow arts circles. Her name did not appear in programs or journals. Young dancers whispered of “the barefoot ballerina,” but most assumed she had died years ago. =====

In reality, she lived in a small one-room flat in the Arbat, surrounded by relics:
* Yakob’s silent metronome
* Moishe’s rusted wrench set
* Rosa’s hand-mended tablecloth
* A portrait of Israel, half-faded
* A newspaper clipping showing Artur at a Party banquet, captioned only: “Comrade Administrator.”

She lived on a meager pension, supplemented occasionally by Irina’s quiet generosity.

She still moved, but only in private. Each morning, she would stretch, step, pivot, bow—to no one. A prayer made of motion.

===== In 1975, Irina arranged for the first underground concert of Yakob Gershovitz’s chamber works in decades—held in a private apartment in Leningrad, attended by dissident artists, foreign correspondents, and one KGB agent who did not interfere. =====

A tape of the performance reached Paris, and from there, New York. An émigré magazine published a glowing review titled: “The Sound of Buried Fire: Yakob G. Rediscovered.”

Frankhezka heard a cassette copy a year later. She played it once, then placed it beside Yakob’s ashes.

In 1977, Franka began dictating her memoirs to Irina. She insisted the work be titled “Not for Publication.”

The chapters were organized not chronologically, but emotionally:
* “What the Fog Covered”
* “When We Forgot to Whisper”
* “The Hand I Held in 1942”
* “No One Danced After That”
* “What Artur Didn't Say”
* “Ashes Don’t Applaud”
* “Final Rehearsal”

She wrote until her body gave out.

===== Frankhezka Gershovitz died on April 14, 1978, aged 71. =====

The official obituary in the Sovietsky Teatr newsletter was two sentences long:

: 

But a small group of former students, underground musicians, and Irina herself gathered in the back room of an old cultural hall near Tsvetnoy Bulvar.

There, a cassette of Yakob’s Lullaby for a Starved City was played.

No one danced.

But one young ballerina—unprompted—removed her shoes and walked the floor in silence. A single turn. A bow. Stillness.

Franka’s ashes were placed in an urn beside those of her brother Yakob, just as she had wished.

Would you like to follow the posthumous rediscovery of the Gershovitz legacy in 1978–1988, the era of dissident exile, émigré publication, and slow Western recognition? Or would you prefer to pause here for a story or vignette from this decade of stillness and shadows?