Wasserman Mikhail Israilevich (1949)

Wasserman (Vasserman) Mikhail Israilevich (born 1949, Riga) — artist, theatre and television actor, director, writer, and simultaneous interpreter.

Mikhain Wasserman was the son of Riva Moiseyevna Oklyanskaya and Israil Tevyevich Wasserman. His mother was a well-known English and Latvian language teacher in Riga who, until 1972, served as deputy head of Riga Secondary School No. 40, where she introduced advanced English language studies. In 1972, the family emigrated to Israel, where she continued teaching English. His father taught bookkeeping, finance, and credit at the Riga Cooperative Technical School and also wrote poetry. After the move to Israel, he worked as an accountant at the Jerusalem Museum.

In 1966, Mikhail graduated from Riga Secondary School No. 13 specialising in physics and mathematics (named after G. A. Poplyaev), and in 1971 he completed his studies in the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the University of Latvia. In 1970, in collaboration with Tatyana Fel, he co-authored a scientific paper in experimental psychology titled The Specificity of Group Solutions to Creative Problems, which was the first to demonstrate the existence of a class of problems solvable by groups but not by individuals. His thesis, Ranking Methods for the Intellectual Activity Test, received top marks and high praise from Academician Nebylitsyn, director of the Institute of General and Pedagogical Psychology (Moscow).

In 1972, Wasserman emigrated to Israel, where he worked at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1974, following the Yom Kippur War (also known as the October War or the 1973 Arab–Israeli War), he moved to the United States.

From 1975, he served as a leading interpreter for the U.S. Department of State. In the private sector, he participated in hundreds of international conferences as both an interpreter and organiser. He currently owns a prestigious translation bureau.

Since 1979, he has also worked as a commodities broker (futures) in Chicago, and was the owner or co-owner of an oil exploration company in Oklahoma and a precious metal refining plant in New York.

In 1984, he completed studies in painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His artwork has been exhibited in galleries across the U.S. and, in 2000, at the Museum of Foreign Art in Riga (featuring 100 works).

Wasserman has worked in various American and British theatres. At Covent Garden, he was assistant director to Yuri Lyubimov on the production of The Ring of the Nibelung; he also took part in a staging of Hamlet at the Leicester Haymarket Theatre.

He is the author of the play Hannibal, several poetry cycles, and philosophical essays.

From 1996 to 1999, he was the owner, producer, and presenter of “Russian Channel 23” — a weekly Russian-language television programme broadcast in Chicago.

He translated several books into Russian, the most well-known in the CIS being The Third Policeman by Irish writer Flann O'Brien.

From 2001 to 2007, he taught painting at the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga.