Gala Stern (née Halina Silberkweit)
23 August 1932 | Leipzig – 17 May 2022 | Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Linguist and literary scholar
Halina Silberkweit was born in Leipzig-Gohlis in 1932. Her parents were the chemist Efim Silberkweit and the paediatric dentist Maria Rabinowicz. Halina’s mother had come to Leipzig from Königsberg to study. Her father, Efim, studied at the Technical University in Dresden from 1928 and obtained his doctorate in chemistry there in 1931. They lived in her grandparents’ house right next to the Gohlis Castle.
When the National Socialists came to power, Efim Silberkweit – who was of Jewish descent and also a Communist – left Germany and went to Moscow, where he managed a chemical factory. His wife and daughter followed him there. In 1937, Efim Silberkweit fell victim to the ‘Stalinist purges’ and was executed that same year. It was not until after 1990 that he was posthumously rehabilitated.
Despite everything, Halina remembered having a happy childhood in the Soviet Union. Mother and daughter survived the war, which began on 22 June 1941, in Uzbekistan. There, her mother Maria worked as a dentist; they lived in a yurt. After 1945 and a stay in Munich, both were able to emigrate to America to join relatives in 1947. Their grandfather, Kaufmann Silberkweit, and his family had fled via Paris to New York in 1939 and were living in Albany, New York. Maria and Halina Silberkweit followed them there. Halina was brought up by her grandmother Anna because her mother, whose qualifications were not recognised in the USA, had to study again. Later, her mother became a professor of paediatric dentistry and campaigned for the rights of Black people in America.
Halina, who now called herself Gala, met the Hungarian-Jewish exile Ivan Stern. They married and studied at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Gala studied European and Russian literature and was fluent in Russian, German, English, French and Spanish. She became a teacher of Russian and French language and literature at the Park School in Baltimore, where her three children were later also educated. Ivan Stern worked on the US space programme and later acted as a consultant to NASA. … At the age of 80, Gala wrote her memoirs, Recollections of the Past. Ivan Stern died in 2020, and two years later, Gala Stern passed away in Baltimore at the age of 90.
NOTE: *) Due to the nature of the exhibition format, the biographical details listed above have necessarily been abridged. Visitors to the exhibition have the opportunity to read an expanded version of the biographical details in the exhibition folders provided. The entire, very extensive project includes further biographies, additional content and research … is in progress – also online…