In memoriam Nina Stepanskaya, Z"L
Human memory… That set of algorithms and reactions in our brain that enables us to process the world around us and somehow make sense of that all. My memory is painfully informing me that it’s been 10 years today without Nina Stepanskaya. A decade... Nina was my mentor, friend, colleague, scholarly advisor, research collaborator, partner in crime of the Jewish cultural revival in Belarus, and a rarest kind of person above all. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Nina changed my entire life beginning at the moment when I first met her in 1993 at the Music Lyceum in Minsk. And then followed the happiest 14 years of a most enriching and vibrant human experience, the light of which continues to show me way even today, countless years later. The wound hasn't healed, and I doubt it ever will, and that's the way to keep the memory of that uniquely wondrous human being in this world. May her memory be for a blessing.
