ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF EXILE

A woman recounts her family’s perilous flight from Russia and then Yugoslavia—and her struggle to understand their trials—in this mixture of history and memoir.

Romanov’s paternal grandmother, Daria, and grandfather, Ivan, met and married enthusiastically in 1910, a time of great promise for them personally but a tumultuous one for Russia. When the revolution reached a fevered pitch, the Bolsheviks set their murderous sights on the Cossacks, endangering Ivan’s life. As a stunned Ivan explained to Daria: “There has been a formal government directive. All adult Cossack males are to be killed. All our land will be taken over. Wives and families will be moved away. Pure evil has been let loose.” They would flee by horse-drawn cart to Crimea, over 1,000 km. away, abandoning their home. After staying in a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lemnos, they finally settled in Yugoslavia, a “tortured land,” from which they would have to flee when the country fell out of favor with the Soviet Union. After years in yet another refugee camp in Trieste, Italy, the family, now including the author and her parents, Tolya and Zora, made its way to the United States in 1953. Romanov captures her family’s tribulations with novelistic poignancy and furnishes a brief but historically astute account of Russia’s turbulent century as well. She also reflects on her life growing up in San Francisco—she “rejected my Russianness” and found herself at perennial loggerheads with her father. But she traveled to Russia in an effort to understand the troubles that shaped her family. This is a harrowing but touching tale, one that couples cinematic drama with both tragedy and triumph.

A gripping family account, historically rigorous and ultimately moving.