Category Archives: A.V. Bari

This is one of the photographs saved from the police in suitcases for 100 years. Only now has it been revealed.

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Only I will understand these notes, mais le blog, c’est à moi.

Henrietta S. Kahn’s nephew Dr. Hugo Adolfovich Leventhal was from Riga but lived in Moscow, in the house of Aleksandr Bari. Hugo was the daughter of Henrietta’s sister Rose, who lived in Riga. His father would be Adolf Leventhal.

There is a picture of him with Henrietta, via our cousins Leventhal-Bari-Efron (Sergei Efron, husband of Marina Tsvetaeva). I do not yet understand exactly who these people are. Reasoning: Leventhal and Bari are names we know already, and Efron appears to be related by marriage.

There is also a family picture with Boris Pasternak on his 17th birthday, in 1907.

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Here is one and there is another. They are for Aleksandr Voskresensky and my cousin Lydia Voskresenskaya, and her sister Eugenia Nersessova and her husband. In November, 1921 they were arrested and held in Butyrskaya Prison until December.

The site the letters are on seems to be about political prisoners 1918-1922 and 1922-1938. It is very inconvenient not to read Russian.

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This is a current photograph of the house in Kazan where my cousins Anya Alexandrovna Bari and Alexander Filippovich Samoilov lived from 1910-1930. As you see, it has a plaque.

During the Russian Civil War the Samoilovs’ twin sons, Alexander Veniaminovich’s first grandchildren, walked to Shanghai with the Czech batallions and sailed to San Francisco, where my great-aunt Valeska met them on the docks and put them on a train to Harvard.

Samoilov could have come as well and some thought he should have done, but he had research in course that he did not want to abandon. He was awarded the Lenin Prize in 1930, as was Alexander Veniaminovich’s business associate Vladimir Shukov also. Samoilov worked with Pavlov, Nobel Prize 1904.

I have very brilliant cousins.

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I am working on things related to this post, and it is taking up time formerly devoted to blogging. Keywords here are Benjamin Matveevich Bary and Matvee Bary.

Benjamin was “a hot opponent of Talmudism,” as it was said by one Russian official who turned him down for a job as a kind of commissioner of Jewish affairs. He had converted to Christianity, and thought everyone should.

“Humboldt was, in general, against baptism [conversion of Jews]; see Bulletin of Russian Jews 24 (1871).” Nonetheless, he recommended Benjamin for that job in St. Petersburg.

I would like to know who Matvee was and what his relationship with Benjamin was like.

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