He practiced with Eva Vida and is a personal friend of Yevgeniy Bilauer. He said of Bilauer, "Yes, he is still performing in Russia. He used to run around the ring doing back crosses with five clubs, and could throw five up high and somersault under them. He does tricks more difficult than Sergei Ignatov." 

When the Moscow Circus toured Afghanistan once, the Afghan king saw the show and asked Shvartsman and several others to give a command performance in his castle. "He gave me a watch and a gold pen from Schaeffer," Shvartsman recalled. 

He loved horses and did many highly technical tricks on horseback, including seven sticks, and seven balls ashYturned himself around 360-degrees on the back of the moving horse. He did a whole act with one ball, another whole act with three balls, did six torches, and did eight rings while bouncing a ball on his head. He did 10 rings without the bounce. He was also always very musical, and played saxophone and drums in various performances.  

But one of his favorite acts was just three balls, and he spent hours developing new tricks. That included cascading three, bending over forward and then stepping through the pattern with one leg then the other until he was juggling three blind behind his back.  He also spread  his legs wide while cascading three and rolled over forward while .continuing to juggle. 

His favorite trick, however, was with one ball. He held it between his feet while standing, and did a front somersault while flipping the ball up to catch it on his head as he came up out of the roll. Gena now does her own version of the same trick, bouncing the ball on her head, doing a cartwheel and catching it on her head again. She also does a somersault and catch on the head. 

His finale trick in the single ball routine was to toss it high and catch it in a balance on his head. He then lay down in a push-up position and rolled the ball down his back to rest between his heels. He then did a forward roll, kicking the ball up high with his heels to catch it behind his neck as he stood up. "I could do that six or eight times in a row," he said. "Now I can't even believe I did it! No one does it today." 

Gena grew up learning acrobatic tricks with her parents and was performing at age five. She began juggling before her sixth birthday. But the decline of Communism in the USSR brought with it the demise of the state circus, and hardships for circus performers. The Shvartsmans found themselves without a job, without an apartment, and with very little money. Yevgeniy said, "No one wanted my act any more. I wanted my children in the circus and no one wanted them. Everything was, 'No, no, no.' Everything had changed." 

 They also found that their Jewish religion begran attracting discrimination in some areas. Several of Yevgeniy's relatives had moved to the United States previously, and he decided to apply for asylum as well. A cousin sponsored his immigration, and they moved to Queens, N.Y., in 1991. His mother joined them in this country a year later. 

Within a year they had rekindled the family heritage, creating a new Grimmy Family Circus in America that starred mom, dad and their two daughters. They developed an excellent relationship with the Charles Rapp agency and for three years did good business touring resorts in the Catskill Mountains, Gena did contortion, acrobats, balance and juggling acts, and Yevgeniy did spinning plates and his three ball act, and passed clubs with Gena. Sister Vikki began performing a solo act in the show at age three. 

The family attended a performance of the Ringling Brothers show in New York, and Gena and Viktoriya approached talent production vice president Tim Holst aftpr the show. Holst went to see them perform at the Fernwood Hotel in Pennsylvania. The family feared their chances were dashed when Holst couldn't find a seat in the facility and had to stand to watch the show!  However, he was impressed enough to fly the family to a Ringling performance in Dallas, where they met CEO Kenneth Feld. 

Gena was asked to do a pre-show "adventure," a feature of the current Ringling production in which the public is invited to come into the rings an hour before the show to interact with selected performers. After seeing that performance, Feld signed Gena to a two-year contract. 

Holst flew them to Boston for their first Ringling performance in the final show at the Boston Garden. They then flew to Tampa to rehearse with the show and Gena did a publicity performance at the Jerry Lewis Telethon. The family joined the Ringling "blue" show full-time in January 1996. 

The show moves from city to city weekly, doing about seven performances in each of the 45-50 cities during the year-long tour. Living in a trailer has been hard, Yevgeniy admitted, especially since the birth of their third daughter, Maria, in January of this year. They spend a lot of their time away from the ring in the trailer with their extensive video collection, watching movies of Gene Kelly, Judy Garland and circus videos.

Gena and her father modified her stage act for the circus, taking into account an audience on three sides rather than one and the need to fill a larger space with movement, props and personality. "The most important things are tricks and styles - the posing, smiling and movement," said Gena. "Some jugglers just stand there and juggle, and hopefully they at least smile some." 

She, on the other hand, moves constantly, whirling around the ring handling her props and freezing frequently with arms extended, head thrown back confidently, and a huge smile on her face. 

Yevgeniy constantly stresses style in working on the act because he knows it is at least as important as technique. He said, "I never did throws between my legs with sticks because I didn't think the pose was very flattering. Another thing is I don't think mouthsticks work well for women, so Gena never worked on that. I hold up Eva Vida as the model for Gena." 

Yevgeniy has passed on his passion for practice to Gena. The family rises at 6 a.m. for a jog to begin the day's routine. There is an extended rehearsal period in the morning, and shorter periods to warm up for performances and after performances. She also attends three hours of Ringling-sponsored school in the afternoons along with 30 other young people who perform with or travel with the troupe. 

Gena has learned quickly, and can now do five clubs with up to 50 under the leg throws. She has done a pirouette under three-high club tosses 240 times in a row. She is working on seven clubs, and on increasing her eight ball multiplex to 12 balls. Yevgeniy believes Gena has the inner drive to be the best, and that he has the coaching techniques to help her do that. He challenges her to push her limits and she responds. "The first time I asked her if she could do 100 times a pirouette throwing three clubs high she could only do a few. But a year ago in Tampa she did 101, and in Albuquerque a few months ago she did it 240 times without stopping. She trusts me, I'm her father, her coach. If I tell her she's ready to practice seven clubs, she says, 'OK, let's go!' I know the secrets so that she car do it. One secret is never to work on four or six clubs on the way to seven because the pattern is different. Same with balls. She learned three and five on the way to seven but never four or six..

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