Professor Emeritus of German and Russian Peteris "Pete" Silins died November 5, in Crawfordsville.
Silins was born April 27, 1930 in Leningrad and grew up in Latvia. Along with his family, he fled to a displaced persons camp in Ansbach, Germany during World War II. Afterward, the Bethany Reformed Church of Kalamazoo sponsored the four refugees, allowing them to immigrate to the United States.
During the Korean Conflict, he served in the U.S. Army Intelligence as an interpreter and linguist. In the Reserves, he taught Russian at the Army Language School in Monterrey, CA.
Silins married Regina Berzins in 1954. Despite never having attended high school, he was admitted to Michigan State University. After graduation, he worked briefly as an engineer for the Checker Cab Company. He received a Master’s degree from Indiana University and then embarked on a 37-year career at Wabash, where he started the College’s Russian language program (shortly after Sputnik) and also, with Professor Wendell Calkins H’59, the Chinese language program.
Silins was an avid cyclist, and following a heart attack in 1971 rode regularly, logging thousands of miles to keep himself fit. Silins continued graduate studies at Middle-bury College in Vermont, and as a two-time Fulbright Scholar, he studied at the University of Mainz and the Goethe Institute in Germany.
Silins was a member of the American Associations of Teachers of German and Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, Delta Phi Alpha (an honorary German language society), and Phi Gamma Delta, and the Latvian Centers in Kalamazoo and Indianapolis. He served as dean of students for the summer high school at the Latvian Center Garezers in Three Rivers, MI. Silins was named an honorary alumnus of Wabash College in 1992 before retiring in 1995. With his colleague, Professor Emeritus of French Dick Strawn, he translated Rimsky- Korsakov’s "Night before Christmas," which was performed by the Indiana University and San Francisco Opera Companies.
In 1992, attending the annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of German, Silins traveled with his wife to an area of the former East Germany where he had done forced labor during World War II. The couple also visited their homeland, Latvia, for the first time in 48 years that summer.
Longtime friend Professor Emeritus of Spanish Bernie Manker recently returned to studying Russian with Silins. "I wrote compositions for him and he was hard on me and my poor memory of Russian, which I hadn’t used in 34 years," Manker joked. "Pete was very generous with his time, and I really enjoyed his stories about his early life in the Soviet Union, Latvia, Germany. We built up a lot of memories here at Wabash. I will miss him tremendously."
Silins is survived by his daughter, Renate, and son, Peter. His wife, Regina, preceded him in death.
—from the Kalamazoo Gazette Read tributes to Professor Silins from Jon Graf '96 and Professor Dick Strawn at WM Online.
A remembrance
Pete Silins was tough, and I mean that as a compliment. He had to be tough to survive what he saw as a boy during World War II, when Stalin and Hitler trampled murderously over his country, Latvia.
At the war’s end, racked by hunger in a European refugee camp, Pete one day watched a U.S. G.I. toss a half-eaten sandwich out of a jeep and into the dirt a few feet away. Pete was too proud to pick it up and eat it.
I recalled that story when I heard about Pete’s death. He had shared it during one of our Russian tutorials in the early 1980s. I knew back then that I wanted to be a foreign correspondent; and with the Cold War still raging, my career goal was to someday be "our man in Moscow," as Pete often called me as a way of encouraging me. I never did go to Moscow; I chose instead to become our man in Mexico. But the things I learned from Pete in the Russian and Russian history courses I had with him—about language, about foreign and especially authoritarian societies—stayed with me. One of them was that you have to be tough: Pete often reminded me that navigating places like Eastern Europe or Latin America can be as arduous as memorizing Russian noun cases, but that the payoff for digging in can be as satisfying as learning an elegant line from Tolstoy.
Pete was chiefly a German professor at Wabash. But I got to know him perhaps better than most students because I was one of the few who wanted to learn Russian. Some semesters I was the only one, which meant Pete and I usually met in his office on the second floor of Yandes (now Detchon) Hall, where he often sat in an easy chair and listened to me translate Pravda articles that he’d dug up for me. Sometimes when I blundered he would stop me and say, "Kak vam nye stidyet (You should be ashamed). Thank God you want to be a journalist, because that slip-up could get you killed if you were going to be a spy." But he always said these things with a large, knowing smile and a laugh. And I laughed, too: it didn’t take long to realize that Pete wasn’t indulging in the hard-handedness he’d grown up with under fascists and communists—he was mocking it.
Even if those tutorials were hard, I could forget about it when Pete and his wife Regina, one of the sweetest women I ever met, invited me to their home for Latvian dinners. There was a warmth to those evenings, especially the winter nights that evoked scenes from Dr. Zhivago, which we enhanced with after-dinner vodkas. It was the kind of generous and relaxingly cerebral hospitality I enjoyed so much of at Wabash. But it also showed Pete in a light I like to remember—relishing the life he’d found in America, one that didn’t require the tense toughness he’d had to summon each day as a boy.
As the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, a colleague at Newsweek (the magazine I worked for then) was looking for comments from experts and asked me if I could recommend anyone. I thought immediately of Pete and was delighted to see him quoted: "I think it can’t be stopped," he said of the Soviet bloc’s sudden collapse. "People have breathed too much fresh air to be subdued." Our man in Crawfordsville.
One of my last academic moments with Pete was my oral comprehensive exam. By then we were friends; but he challenged me (I recall questions like, "Please describe for us with a few examples the inversion of Russian power structures after the Revolution") because he knew that anything less would be an insult to all the work we’d done together. It would have been like throwing a half-eaten sandwich at my feet—and he always expected his students to be proud enough to reject that sort of thing.
Da svedanya, Pete. And sbaseeba—thank you.
—Tim Padgett ’84