A Doctor Who Fled Russia Remembers the Pain of Antisemitism

It was rare for Jewish women to practice radiology in post-Stalinist Russia, but that’s what Diana Amastis, now 95, did for most of her life in St. Petersburg in the 1950s and ’60s.

She left that life in 1992, at the age of 64, to make New York her new home. She came with her daughter and granddaughter, to care for her ailing father, who had left Russia years earlier and lived in Washington Heights.

Dr. Amastis remembers spending most days during her first years in the city caring for her granddaughter, who took English lessons at a school near their home. They’d wander the neighborhood on the way to school. Dr. Amastis would wait outside the classroom to glean useful phrases, but she never felt confident about her command of the language.

“It’s very difficult to start a new English language in my age,” she said. “But I tried my best.”

Still, after her 30 years of living in New York, she has found a community; everyone who knows her calls her Dina. At the local synagogues and at the Washington Heights Y, she met other Russian immigrant families. Some of them, like her, were old enough to have lived through the siege of Leningrad in the 1940s, which killed more than a million people, some felled by artillery and others by hunger. Dr. Amastis still has nightmares about being one of the lucky ones who survived, and she guards those memories closely.