Through Changing Times

Most people live one life. Edward Kodinsky lived several — and had the audacity to write them all down. Soviet engineer blocked by his Jewish identity; refugee who rebuilt from nothing; entrepreneur who beat a six-billion-dollar company in court. Through Changing Times is the story of a man who refused every ceiling he was ever handed.On February 12, 1981, Edward Kodinsky stood at Soviet passport control with five suitcases, three hundred dollars, a pregnant wife, and a six-year-old son. A Soviet officer blocked his path: "e;Prove this child is yours."e; He had the photo album his mother had pressed into his hands the night before. She had seen this moment coming before he had. There was not a single photograph of his son in it.Tanya stood in front of a Soviet colonel, nine months pregnant, and slowly unbuttoned her winter coat — one button at a time — and told him to be ready to deliver a baby right there in the terminal. The colonel turned pale. "e;Let them go,"e; he said.That morning was the last page of one life and the first page of several more.Edward Kodinsky was born in Moscow in 1946, the son of a workaholic father and a mother whose name meant wisdom. He grew up in a city of communal apartments and long lines, of whispered antisemitism and mandatory atheism, in a society that kept its boot on your neck while insisting it was lifting you up. He served in the Soviet Army, worked as a lumberjack in Siberia, and prepared to defend a Ph.D. he would never finish — he abandoned it rather than risk the "e;Brain Drain"e; policy that could trap him in the country for good. Along the way, he fell in love with a woman of aristocratic lineage who had grown up sleeping on a cot beneath a baby grand piano in a one-room communal apartment, and married her. Unwilling to accept a future decided for him, he gathered the courage and found the exit that carried his young family into a world they could not yet imagine.America made good on its promise. Within five weeks of landing in Boston, Edward had his first engineering job. As a software engineering manager, he led a demoralized team through an impossible deadline with an unconventional approach and a standing order of pizza and beer — quiet leadership that got him promoted, then sent to Japan to port software onto Hitachi and Fujitsu mainframes. In 1989, he founded Conextions, Inc., pioneering the technology that connected legacy mainframe systems to the emerging World Wide Web. A decade later, WRQ, Inc. acquired it. When a six-billion-dollar cable giant later tried to bury a small business standing in its way, Kodinsky spent three years refusing to blink — and won on his own terms.In the middle of all that ambition, he found something he wasn't looking for: a Christian faith, discovered through a Bible study on the Jewish roots of Christianity. He and Tanya went on to cofound the Chamber Music Foundation of New England and the International Chamber Music Ensemble Competition, giving young musicians the stages they never had. In retirement, the traveling never stopped — Petra's ancient facades, the temples of Southeast Asia, the war-scarred beauty of the Balkans, the winding streets of Transylvania — two people still hungry to see what else the world had to show them.Through Changing Times is the full account: engineer, refugee, entrepreneur, believer, philanthropist, husband of fifty years — written with the precision of a man who spent a career solving impossible problems, and the candor of one who no longer has anything left to prove.This is a book about one man's life. But somewhere in these pages, you may recognize your own — the leaving, the building, the love that holds when everything else shifts. This is a book about what we carry when we leave, what we find when we arrive, and what it means — finally, improbably, joyfully — to be home.Pull up a chair. This one takes a while, and you will not want it to end.