Tova Yedlin (1921–2017)

1. Tova Yedlin (Photograph courtesy of the Edmonton Beth Shalom Synagogue).

I have before me the second edition (1985) of Sergei Pushkarev’s The Emergence of Modern Russia, 1801–1917, translated by Robert H. McNeal and Tova Yedlin. On the inside cover, in Tova’s hand there is a dedication: “Homo sum et nil humanum a me alienum puto. To Natalia and Oleh, colleagues and dear friends. With love, Tova. June 1985.” The Latin quotation from Terence, probably written from memory – “I am human and regard nothing that is human as alien to me” – is an apt and worthy description of our colleague and dear friend, Tova Yedlin, who passed away on 17 September 2017. Natalia Pylypiuk and I recall Tova and her late husband, Moshe, as two of the warmest and most welcoming people we met on our arrival in Edmonton in 1983. We had the pleasure of working and socializing with Tova until 1996, when she retired as Professor Emerita. Now we join our colleagues to commemorate her life.

All who knew her will remember a quiet, self-effacing woman and scholar with an indomitable temperament, a wry smile, and a warm heart. I particularly liked her ironic skepticism when it came to departmental politics. Tova always spoke softly but she had firm opinions and views, which endeared her to me.

Tova was born in Rivne, Ukraine (in her time, Równe, interwar Poland). She graduated with distinction from the Tadeusz Kościuszko State Gymnasium-Lyceum in 1939. Evacuated to the Volga region of the USSR after the German invasion of 1941, she escaped the mass murder of Jews that took place in the Rivne region in 1941 and 1942. She immigrated to Canada after the war in 1948. Moving to Edmonton in 1950, she earned a BEd (1956), an MA (1959), and a PhD in History (1969) from the University of Alberta, where she subsequently taught Russian literature and social and intellectual history until her retirement. Tova became only the eighth woman to receive tenure at the University of Alberta in 1975.

Tova was a key member of the University of Alberta’s Department of Slavic and East European Studies, which was later merged into the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies. Her areas of interest were Russian intellectual, political, and social history; Polish history; women and socialism; and the history of settlement of Alberta’s Central and East European ethno-cultural groups. She edited several volumes on such themes as women in Russia and the Soviet Union, ethnicity in Canada, and Germans from Russia in Alberta. In 1999 she published Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography. The University of Alberta honours Tova’s memory with the annual Tova Yedlin Lecture Series through an endowment at the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies. The series focuses on the history of Central and East European Jewry prior to the Holocaust, with particular emphasis on Jewish–Gentile relations, primarily in the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

Tova Yedlin was a devoted member of the Canadian Association of Slavists, a participant of many annual conferences. She was elected Honorary President in 2004–05. She will be greatly missed by all.

Вічна їй пам'ять.