About Yanina

Yanina Kisler emigrated with her parents from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1978. She earned a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT and worked as an engineer doing research for 35 years. She also coached math teams at a local elementary school for 20 years. Her teams won National Championships almost every year. In addition to her technical work, Yanina, with her husband, has been a competitive ballroom dancer, twice winning the National Championship and twice placing in the semi-final of World Championships. They have two daughters and three grandchildren.

Yanina has always made traveling and seeing the world one of her priorities. Upon retirement, that interest took a more central stage. She and her husband have traveled and explored the Arctic, the Antarctic, and many places in between. Encounters with glaciers, icebergs, penguins, seals, and the sheer vastness and amazingness of Svalbard, Antarctica, and islands in the Southern Ocean influenced the stories in Yanina’s second book, Tales from the Cold.

Yanina’s first book, They Were Fighters: Oral Histories of Jews Leaving the Soviet Union, is based on interviews with more than 100 Jews who emigrated from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 80s. Using their stories, Yanina illuminates their lives and the variety of reasons they had for taking the risk of leaving the “Workers’ Paradise.” It was published in 2024.

Yanina's second book, Tales from the Cold, is completely different from They Were Fighters. It is a collection of shot stories inspired by her trips in the Arctic and Antarctic, fiction with a touch of fantasy to see things in the world from a new point of view.

Both books are available on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/They-Were-Fighters-Histories-Leaving/dp/B0DPHXVSQ4

https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Cold-Yanina-Kisler/dp/B0GWRNJG57