Regina Spektor "Fidelity"

Spektor was born in Moscow (in the former Soviet Union), to a musical Jewish family. Her father, a photographer, was also an amateur violinist, and her mother was a music professor in a Russian college of music; her mother now teaches at a public elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York.[1]

Spektor learned how to play piano by practicing on a Petrof that was given to her mother by her grandfather.[2] She was also exposed to the music of rock and roll bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union.[1] The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine, during the period of Perestroika when Jewish citizens were permitted to emigrate. Unfortunately, Regina had to leave her piano behind.[3] The seriousness of her piano studies led her parents to consider not leaving Russia, but they finally decided to emigrate, due to ethnic and political discrimination that Jews were faced with




The young career of Regina Spektor represents the greatness of America and is a wonderful example of how religious freedom and tolerance is so unique and crucial to our place in the 21st Century.

Cliche? Perhaps. Experience has taught me to be intolerant of religious intolerance.