Venyamin Zuskin

Benjamin Zuskin (Russian: Вениамин Львович Зу́скин (Veniamin Lvovich Zuskin); April 28, 1899 – August 12, 1952) was a Soviet and Russian actor and director of the Moscow State Jewish Theatre (GOSET). Zuskin had the title of People's Artist of the RSFSR. Zuskin was born in April 1899 in the town of Ponevezh (Panevėžys), in the then Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire, today Lithuania, a son of a tailor. He attended a cheder. Zuskin was admitted into real school in 1911. Following the April 1915 defeat of a Russian army at the hands of the German army, the Russian authorities ordered the mass deportation of Jews living in central Lithuania to the interior of Russia — approximately 250,000 were expelled. The Zuskin family went to Penza on the European side of the Urals. There he met and married the daughter of another deported family, Rachel Holand (in Russian, Goland). In Penza, Benjamin continued his studies and took roles in a local theatre. In 1920 he became a student of Sverdlovsk Geological Institute, but in 1921 asked for transfer to Moscow Geological Institute. In that year, a daughter, Tamara, was born in Moscow. Shortly afterward, however, Benjamin and Rachel separated, and Rachel and Tamara moved to Rachel's home town, Vilkomir (Ukmergė), Lithuania, and soon thereafter to Kovno (Kaunas), the temporary capital of Lithuania. Tamara rejoined her father in Moscow in 1935 and enrolled in medical school there. (Rachel, her second husband, and their three children remained in Kaunas. All but one daughter were killed in the Kovno Ghetto, the urban concentration camp established by Nazi Germany and their Lithuanian collaborators in the Viliampolė / Slobodke neighborhood of Kaunas.) Benjamin remarried in 1935 and had another daughter, Alla. His second wife died in 1937.