 So, I'd like to go ahead and get started, just to be mindful of everybody's time. So welcome everyone to 100 years of exile of Romanov's search for her father's Russia. This is a virtual talk with Tanya Romanov, and my name is Taryn Edwards, and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. And I have to say, one of the things that we love to do is highlight our mechanics members, creative endeavors, and this is certainly one of them. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mechanics Institute, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, the oldest in fact designed to serve the general public in California. You don't have to be a mechanic in order to get something out of your membership here. We are also a cultural event center and a world-renowned chess club that is the oldest in the nation. Right now, due to the shelter in place, almost all of our activities are virtual, but I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It's only $120 a year, and with that you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Tanya Romanov is an award-winning travel photographer and the author of three books, Mother Tongue, A Saga of Three Generations of Balkan Women, Never a Stranger, which is a travel story collection and the book she will talk about today, which is One Hundred Years of Exile. Tanya's work has also been featured in multiple travel anthologies and translated into Serbo-Croatian and Russian, and when she is not on the road, she splits her time between San Francisco and Sonoma County. Tanya is an active member of the Mechanics Institute's Writers' Community, and her books are available via Alexander Book Company and at your local bookstore. Now, the way the event tonight is going to work is Tanya's going to speak for a while, and then later we will take questions. So I encourage you to put your questions in the chat space, and when she is done presenting her book, we will go through and attempt to answer all of your questions. All right, so why don't we go ahead and talk to Tanya? Thank you. Can you all hear me? Yes. Well, thank you, Taryn, and thank you to the Mechanics Institute, one of my favorite organizations in San Francisco, with my favorite stairwell. An incredibly beautiful place and wonderful events. So I'm very thrilled and honored to be here. It's really strange to launch a book in the middle of COVID, but every once in a while, you get a benefit you don't expect. And about five minutes ago, a face appeared on the screen in front of me. My best friend from when I was six years old. I did get her to laugh, and she lives in Washington, DC, and her name is Tanya, too. And I haven't seen her face in probably 50 years. So COVID has brought us together. And so thank you to all of you. I will talk for a while, and then you can post questions that Taryn will coordinate at the end. 100 Years of Exile is a book that I put out. And I think it was a book that had to be written. I don't think I knew that until I finished writing it. And I'm really nervous as heck because nobody's ever asked me to talk about my writing process. And so I worked hard on trying to share some of this with you. The book came about, I had published the book about my mother. Three generations of Balkan women. I grew up in a refugee camp. My mother was Croatian. My father was Russian. We came to America when I was quite young. And so I had written this book. And I grew up in a community that wanted me to be Russian because we were a bunch of Russian refugees. Everybody spoke Russian. We went to Russian school. I was supposed to marry a Russian. I was supposed to be in Russian. And in fact, my father was a refugee twice in his life. That's what this book is about. And by the time he got to America, he had been in a refugee camp for five years as an adult, not knowing if he could go anywhere. And that was the second time after he'd been very successful in Yugoslavia. And so I think he just never believed that this was for good, that we wouldn't be evicted again at some point in time. And so I was supposed to fit into their concept of the world. And I resisted that very much. And so I released this book about my mother. I am doing a lot of launches in person. I married an American. I have American stepchildren. And I was doing a launch for my grandkids in Colorado. And my stepdaughter was introducing me to everybody that she invited. And I suddenly figured out that this woman that she just told me I could speak Russian with was Marina Romanova, Marina Romanoff, who was and is the closest living relative of Tsar Nicholas II. Now mind you, I grew up with his picture on people's walls next to the icons. You know, it was like, really, this person is real. But yes, she was. The amazing thing, though, was not that I met Marina, but I didn't meet her in San Francisco with a bunch of Russians. I met her in Colorado in a small town in the mountains because her daughter and my daughter were very good friends. So it was sort of like the launch of a very strange set of circumstances. And they did continue because this was in May of 2018. Within a few weeks, I received an erroneous email, aimed at someone called Atsom Amacheyev. Now I write as Tanya Romanoff because I was told that if you're going to publish a book and you have a name that people can't spell, pronounce or remember, forget it. So Amacheyev didn't fly. But my grandmother's maiden name was Romanoff. So don't mind the way it was. But I got this email that was, can you hear me? Now you're muted, Taryn. OK, so I don't know where I got muted, but I'm just going to continue with the story. So I got this erroneous email to a man called Atsom Amacheyev. Amacheyev is such a rare name that there are no Amacheyevs outside of Russia, who are not my immediate family. There were three brothers who left. That's it. There are no others. So I ended up connecting with Atsom Amacheyev. So now we're talking about June of 2018. And within 10 days of my hearing for the first time from Atsom Amacheyev, my entire Amacheyev family in San Francisco had agreed to go to Russia and meet with his family. So this book was starting to take shape. And I started writing about my father's family. I just had to do it. And what I decided to do was write the history part first. And then when I went to Russia, see what would have happened, in a sense, to us if we had stayed. That was really the concept that I had. And so the other amazing coincidence that happened, so there were two already, the final one was that today is November 10th, 2020. On November 13th, 1920, my father's family, my grandparents and their sons and daughter, fled Russia for the final time. So we're talking about 100 years to the day. And so if you look at my book, it says publication date November 13th, 2020. And so all these things conspired to make sure I was writing this book. So we agreed we would go to Russia and I started writing. And what I did was the deep dive into the history of my grandmother's family. I started in 1910. And I just started writing. Now, people say, how do you write? You know, do you do it at a certain time? Do you do it at a certain place? I am not a very disciplined person. And I actually write by talking to my telephone. And I'm a crazy walker. I walk for hours every day and I walk and talk. And that is my primary writing vehicle. The drafts of everything I do happen while I'm walking and talking. So that's what happens. And what's interesting is there's a wonderful writing community in the Bay Area of travel writers. And a man called Don George organizes it. There's an annual conference, a book passage. And one of the things that Don George insists on, if you work with him and you're doing travel writing, is travel writing has to be honest. It has to be true. You have to verify all the facts. And so if you're not writing while you're there, you won't remember the facts. So it turns out that that lesson was really important to me in terms of how I write and when I write. So I was writing this book. I started with my grandmother. And I wrote about her and about her youth. Now, I grew up on stories with my grandmother. My grandmother was really mean. But I spent a lot of time with her. Because when I came to America, I was young enough that I was in kindergarten. And my afternoons were with my grandmother in the park. And she told me stories. And so she told me stories about how she didn't want to marry the guy she was supposed to marry. She picked someone else. I mean, she was a hard ass. We're talking about Russia in 1910. And she decides who she's going to marry. It wasn't exactly normal behavior. So I started writing on that. And I got to the point of understanding it with my first book and with this one that what I write is called creative nonfiction. Or at least that's what I call it. So I check all my facts very carefully. I check my memory very carefully for all the facts. But I also want to write about the people I'm writing about as human beings. So they have conversations. Clearly, I was not part of the conversation of my grandmother and her father when she told him she wasn't marrying Mikhail. But it's much more fun if you have a story with human beings in it. So that's my creative nonfiction part. And it's interesting. I've been working with a group of writers. And my friend, Mike Bernhardt, came to me and said, you know, I want to write like that. I have this history stuff and it's getting boring. And so he went away and he tried it and he wrote me shortly. He said, writing history by imagining scenes is freeing. And I thought, yeah, that's absolutely what it is. It's just freeing. You get to do, you get to write fiction almost in the middle of a nonfiction story. So the other thing is I also do a huge amount of fact checking and research. And the thing that is interesting about that and that I would recommend very highly to anybody who's trying to do something like this is do not assume you know what you're going to find. I know that sounds confusing. But studying history can teach you some of the most amazing things. So I'm writing this. I started writing this book and I started doing the research. I obviously had to research Marina's parents because I was going to weave my family's story, The Russians Who Left Russia, with Marina's story, The Royal Romanovs, and the Emma Chayevs who stayed in Russia. And so I was doing research on Marina's story. And Marina's grandmother was Princess Xenia, Tsar Nicholas's sister. What do I learn about her? She wouldn't marry the guy she was supposed to marry. It was like, oh my god, really? How could history fit in with my story so well? So we had these two women in 1910 who follow the same path. It was such a beautiful thing to learn. And I find things like that a lot. I'll give you another example. My family ended up. So my Russian family, Daria, that's my grandmother, and Ivan, my grandfather, were Don Cossacks. And they lived in an area of Russia that's in the southwest of Russia near Ukraine. And now I lost my train of thought of what I was going to. Oh, yeah. And during the Revolution, they were the so-called white army, the Cossacks were. And the communists were the Red Army. And that's what the war, the ultimate civil war, was about. And so they had to flee. And they ended up in Crimea. And in Crimea, they spent a long time, months, waiting to find out what would happen. And during that time, the civil war went on. And when it was over, they had to leave immediately. So the evacuation was a three-day process. They were in a small city called Yefvetoria. Most of the people were in Sevastopol. And the flight was really intense because the land that links Crimea to the mainland froze suddenly, typical Russian story, a quick early freeze. And suddenly the Red military could come in. And so they had to flee. And so I grew up on stories of this. And my grandmother is telling me how the ship was late. And then my cousin, Helen, and I were really interested in all of this. When Helen's father, so that's my uncle, my father's older brother, was in his 70s, she sat down with him with one of those old movie cameras. And she created a movie of his memories of the flight. He was a child. He was about 10 years old at the time. And so he's telling this dramatic story of this flight and they have to leave. Their father is not there because he's out trading for food with the Taktars. And it's the ships have all left and he's not back. And finally, all of a sudden, this last ship shows up. Well, you hear a story like that. And you say, yeah, right, BS. I mean, it's dramatic. You remember it, but you're a kid. This couldn't possibly be true. So again, I go do the research. And this time I'm on the internet because it's in the last year or two. And I find out that there is a ship. It's called the Trashikty 412. It was a ship that got lost in the storm, came in at the last minute. And my family is on the ship's manifest. So it's like the research matched the reality. And it just convinces me that real life is actually just as interesting as fiction, if not more or so. And it sort of got me committed. So my book is meticulously researched. I've also learned that no matter how meticulously researched, and my mother's book was the perfect one to learn this with, when you think about the Balkans, Serbia, Croatia, do you imagine anybody agrees on that history? No, so you think you're writing the truth, but you haven't got a clue. But it's still worth pursuing it and getting as close as you can to your perspective of the truth. So that's what my book was about. So the concept of the story was I wrote from 1910 until the present time and finished all of that before I went to Russia. Because I wanted to document it so that I could understand what I was looking for in Russia. And then our whole family went to Russia. And this is what's so interesting. So, the young man whose email was misdirected to me, because he misspelled the last name. Of course, you know, Russians use the Cyrillic alphabet. So you can spell a Machaev, lots of different ways. He put a Y in the middle of his, and the economist left out the Y. So this is a complete stranger. He's 30 years old. I'm 70, my brother's my age. My cousin's considerably younger, but she's got two children who are 30 and 20. And that's the group that's going to Russia. So we have two 30-year-olds. We have people in the middle, and we have us retirees, and we're all going together. And at some's family whom we've never met, we don't know from Adam, Igor and Ira, invite us to stay at their dacha, their summer house when we get to Russia. So, you know, we head off to Russia. We head off to Russia. Now, I don't know how many, well, a friend of mine told me, don't publish your book right now because relationships between Russia and America are not that great. You might want to wait. And I said, I could wait till I die. Relationships between Russia and America have not been good in my lifetime. I don't know that they're heading for any better. So, you know, I think I should publish it. But now we're visiting this Russian family and we want to go to Crimea. The State Department in 2019 says, do not go to Crimea, you will become a, you will get abducted. It's very dangerous. They went on and on. We were still determined to go. Now, Atsom's father, Igor, is an engineer and he works for the Russian government. So now here's somebody showing up at his house who's an author who documents every single thing that happens. And now I'm going to write about Russia. And what you have to think about is, how am I going to do that in a way that doesn't put him in a bad position? Most of my friends in America write about Russia in a way that would make you think it was hell. You know, from the leadership on down. And so I needed to make sure I wrote a piece that was politically neutral without being politically naive or stupid. And that's the challenge. So that was one of my challenges. I'm going to read a little bit about what we did because what I realized was that if I just wrote about what we really did, it would work because we didn't discuss politics. So I'm going to read to you a paragraph about that. Our countries spend a lot of energy trying to make us distrust each other. Much of it is deeply embedded in all of us. And even our mutual skepticism about the media or governments in general could not make us oblivious to it. But it didn't seem to matter. We do not spend much time debating the cosmic divide. We don't discuss Putin or Trump. When we talk about Ukraine, it is in the context of Igor's mother and sister who live there. When we discuss Crimea, it is about the place where I've learned to swim as a child. The final place where my parents sheltered when fleeing Russia and where my friend Marina Romanova's grandparents had their summer palaces and walked between them. We just talk. As you might with a neighbor who stops by for coffee or as I do when I walk with my friends in the morning or meet them in the neighborhood bar for happy hour, we just talk. And so that's what we did. We just talked and whatever came came. The political discussions were very minimal. And I do mention one of them. And that is my brother and I were in a taxi in Moscow. And I say, I wondered for much of the trip how people in Russia view the United States. My Amachaya hosts are so polite and friendly that I hear almost no criticisms. We also hear little of local politics. One Moscow taxi driver casually says, in your country, if very few voted for a president, could he still win? Sasha and I just look at each other. For sure our current president got elected without a majority of the population voting for him, but we're not going there. Someone else tells us Putin probably won't run again when his term expires. That was wrong, but that's what they thought then. Who might succeed him? I ask, surprised. Ani, my father's famous they haven't decided yet, is the reply. But most people avoid politics as much as they had in my previous visit 40 years earlier. So we find ourselves in Russia talking to human beings about normal non-political things. In fact, it was quite relaxing not to discuss Putin for a month. I'm sorry, not to discuss Trump for a month. So it was really wonderful. And the only time I got into a truly awkward conversation about politics was a dinner I went to visiting my cousin's friends from San Francisco who had moved to Russia. And what was interesting was it was the first time somebody started throwing out sort of really nasty comments about America. And it felt so awkward at first. And in fact, I got into pretty much of a debate. And when I first wrote it up, it sounded dreadful. It sounded like I was just dumping on this person. And then I realized, okay, if you wanna publish something it has to be something that can be read by the person you're writing about without him wanting to come shoot you. So let's think about this again. There are two perspectives to everything. So let me try to understand his perspective. And when I rewrote it, I realized that the reason he was willing to share with me a point of view that the Russians really wouldn't was because he was an American. He wasn't a Russian dumping on America. He was an American with a different point of view than I had. So we could have been debating Trump versus Obama but we were just debating America versus Russia. And I rewrote it and it's completely acceptable. So I find that you should write everything that you feel like documenting. And then you can decide whether to take it out, keep it in, modify it, but you should write it first because controversial issues are the ones that in the end make the story. So that's a rule that I've now learned and I really stick to it. That's gonna be a little bit more of what I'm gonna talk about here. Another thing that happens to me anyway is I learned secrets. And then you say, oh my God, what am I gonna do with these secrets? What if they could hurt someone? I'll give you one from my previous book first because this one is an incredible story. So my mother had six sisters and my grandmother during World War I was sent to a camp in Hungary because her husband worked right next to the Italian border in Croatia in a shipyard. And so that was Austro-Hungary at the time. Italy comes in on the other side of World War I. They're like 10 miles apart. So they send the women away. My grandmother suffered during that time and on her way back, she was abducted. She comes back and she has a child in January of 1919. And when I'm writing the book, and this is one of my favorite ants, when I'm writing the book, a cousin of mine tells me, well, you know, she couldn't have been legitimate. This is another cousin. I mean, they're of, you know, 18. How could she have a child in 19 that was legitimate? And I thought, oh my God, what do I do with this? So I sort of danced around it. Those of you who have read that book can read it again and see if you see an infant or not. But I sort of did a delicate dance around the whole thing. And then much later, after the book was out, I talked to one of my cousins, a daughter of my aunt, and we did a DNA test and we actually found out she is my cousin. Her mother was completely illegitimate. And then I went to this small town medallion in Issa where my mother was born and found out from a historian who was detailing the whole thing that the men went on strike unless the Austro-Hungarians brought back their wives. And so their wives were returned in the first quarter of the year. So it's like, if you just keep pushing on it, you learn incredible things. Well, I learned all kinds of things and I'm gonna read you an example of a little bit. But what's interesting is I'm going to read something and did I see that there was somebody called Faina? She's gone. There was somebody called Faina on this call. And that was the name of Igor's aunt who stayed in the village where he was born. And I couldn't believe it because it's such an unusual name that somebody was on this call for a while. Anyway, I was, the story about Igor's family and Uhtam's family, is it turned out that his grandfather was born three miles from where my grandparents were born. So we figured we have to be related. And while we visited the village where my father was born, which is again, as I say, three miles from the collective farm where his grandfather was born, Igor found the grave of his mother and grandmother, of his grandmother, sorry, like a hundred yards from the house where my father was born. So, we now had even more reason to believe that we were probably related. And so we had this amazing experience. We got very close, we traveled together, we learned some amazing things. And now it's the next day and I'm walking in a small town where we stayed as close to the village as we could get. And I meet a woman just out walking in the streets one morning. And she's the one who asks me what I'm doing there. And I tell her that I'm visiting a family. She actually asks me the name. And I said, I'm a Chayev. And she said, oh, I know the Amachayevs, they lived in Sifima lot. She said, that's where I came from. She said, I knew Faina Amachayev. And I said, nobody comes up with a name like that by accident, so she really did. So she keeps talking and she starts telling me this incredible story. And I actually have my phone with me as always and I turn on the record button. And so I record the whole conversation that we have. So then I come back and I'm now talking to Egood, okay? The Egood is finest nephew. And so when I get back, Egood is packing up the car. I regale him with my story and he looks at me a bit skeptical. You're telling me some stranger that you met out there knew my grandmother. He laughs, humoring me. I mean, we'll talk about a village of, you know, less than a thousand people 50 miles away. Yes, I did. She was a good friend of your aunt Faina. Now Egood is alert. This is not a common name unlike Eda or Anna. I tell him about our conversation. And then I realize I have to let him listen to the recording. When he hears the part about the tragedy, he just nods. He listens to the end, then stares at me and shakes his head. Another Tonya adventure. I can imagine him telling his wife. She mentioned something about a tragedy. I say to him a bit later about your grandmother. A distant look comes into Egood's eyes. Yes, he says. She died when I was young. I think about her gravestone and realize Egood had been around seven years old when she passed. I remember the rustic wooden cross in the ground nearby which he simply said was also a family members. I think about the fact that he had never before been to the cemetery that he hadn't known his great-grandmother was also buried there until he heard this recording. And that Artsum hadn't even known that his father had been to Serpimola as a child. But I also know that if there is a mystery here, it will remain one. No Tolstoyan epic will be shared. There would be no Maudland storytelling followed by a drunken brawl. But there is something almost surreal about my meeting his Aunt Fina's friend on a back street of Uruppinsk, the official nowhere of Russia. Our experience at the cemetery takes on a new perspective as Egood and I look at each other and we both understand that we are on an unusual journey, one in which the past is reaching out and communicating with us in some unexpected ways. So I talk about the fact that there's a mystery and I can't share what it is. So sometimes you just go with part of the story because it was incredible to me that I met someone who knew him but I could not share the story because Egood is a very restrained person who doesn't share privacy. And the reference I made was to someone quite the opposite who shares everything. And so it's what I'm trying to point out is sometimes you share things and sometimes you don't. When I was walking one morning, I met a drunk man and I'm gonna read you about him because this was the opposite experience of everybody else in Russia. So his name is Zhenya. We're walking along a street in a remote part of Russia near Moscow. We move quickly beyond religion and he asks my age. I round up to 70 and a startled look greets my answer followed by a smile. Again, any expectation I might have of a response is confounded. You look so good I could jump in bed with you. It takes me a bit to comprehend what he means as I have not heard flirtation in Russian since I was a young girl but it was not said in a lewd or unkind way and I understand it as a compliment. He apologizes not for any comments but for using the familiar you with me. He realizes I'm old enough to be his mother and he switches to the formal you and tells me again it is all meant as a deep compliment. He moves quickly beyond the seduction that has briefly distracted him continuing a wide raging conversation nearly solo and requiring little encouragement which satisfies this writer's wildest dreams. He tells me about how his 23 year old grandmother had fought and died in the battle of Minsk one of Russia's largest victories in World War II. His other grandfather who had two daughters suffered a radically different fate. He earns some money and bought a bicycle you can he says then points to his own bicycle. They found it accused him of earning money illegally and he was taken away by the NKVD. I remember this with Stalin's secret police. Yevgeny then tells me his grandfather wrote his two daughters once from the Gulag saying I have lost my teeth, I cannot eat, I will soon die. As he talks I realized that his grandparents are the same generation as my father. He could have been describing the fate of my family had they not fled the country in 1920. These were the stories I had come here searching for. Not understanding yet that I would hear none of them from people who not affected as Yevgeny was by too much alcohol always retaining the privacy they sow treasure. Tearing up he tells me no one ever heard from his grandfather again. I touch his shoulder and tell him he is a good man. But as he looks at me I see the responsibilities of being the bad guy in this world fall back on his shoulders and now we are both near tears. So I meet Yevgeny out in the middle of nowhere. He's drunk as a skunk. He's fallen off his bicycle. He's flirting with me, he's telling me stories. And I also learned later that he is a respected lawyer in Moscow in another life. And now I'm thinking what do I do with this story? And I finally decided that first of all, I loved Yevgeny. I mean, he was wonderful. And secondly, I had to share the story because he was the only one who told me some of these things that have disappeared in Russia because you couldn't talk about him. So I wrote it and then I changed his name. So that was what I finally decided was what I would do. And someday I hope to be in Moscow and talk to him about it. But I feel good about what I did. So that's kind of what I have to say. I will say one other thing that I think is important in writing, and that is you have to leave some mysteries to the very end of the book. You want people to have something to keep reading the book for. And so, for example, we obviously thought we were related to the Amachayevs. I actually snuck a 23andMe DNA kit into the country and snuck their spit out of the country. But you don't find out until the very end what we learned about that family. So that's what I'm gonna close this on and give you guys a chance to ask questions and steer me whichever way you wanna go. Well, thank you. That was quite a journey. So if you have questions for Tanya, let's put them in the chat space. To start things off, we have a question from Matthew who wonders if you could say more about how the book is about the search for your father's Russia, his experiences and how the writing of it, the researching of it, how that really affected your relationship and your understanding of your dad. Well, it's really interesting. I don't think I knew until I finished the book what the book was about. Now, all of my friends in my writing groups knew what the book was about, but I didn't. I think I had to write it. And the book is really a work of atonement. It's my apology for not understanding my father. And it's my desire to sort of bring the story to life and acknowledge understanding what he went through and the price he paid for the life I have lived. And it was really in the writing of the book that I understood that. And it is interesting because one of the things that I forgot to mention and I will now is that I think one of the most important things a writer has to have is a community. And my writing groups are just so wonderful and so supportive. I'm looking at some of them right now. It's an incredible gift. And it's also very hard. Those of you who have done this know because you write something and you think, oh, this is fabulous. And then you take it to your writing group and they rip it to shreds and you say, oh, I guess I have to keep working on it. But they kept pushing me on what was I writing about? And it really took till I was finished almost writing it. And there's a section in the book where I go into a church in Russia. And I am not a church person, but I love churches. I'm not a religion person. I take it back. I love churches. I think they're beautiful. And I go into this church and a woman, you know, one of those women who clean the churches tells me I can't take photographs. And another one, a wonderful one says to me, you can, if the Batsushka Bluggislavit, so if the priest gives you his blessing and I go in and I get the priest's blessing. And it's like all of a sudden when I finish writing about getting his blessing, I realized that this priest will always be with me. And the blessing he gave me was my forgiveness and I carry it with me. So it was like, I don't think I knew what the trip to Russia was for. I don't think I knew why I was writing the book. I just had to write the book and now I have such deep peace and joy about having done it. So it was well worth it. Thank you, Matthew for asking. And I think you've made it clear how important it is to have a community of writers to help you kind of see through what did it, see the point, what it is, are you really writing about? You need help doing that because it's easy to get into a tunnel and not be able to see the big picture. It is extremely easy and it's also extremely easy to just sort of write the surface and to keep poking at it is hard. And it's really wonderful to do it once you do it. It's not wonderful to do it, I take it back. It's wonderful to have done it. It's the experience. All right, George has a question. He's wondering, will there be an audio version? Oh my God, I can't believe you just asked that. Oh my God. I went for a walk because I was so stressed out about this call. I went for a walk with my friend, Ann and we just had to choose one of three segments to approve for the marketing of the audiobook. It's just being finished. Well, good way to go, George. I can't believe you asked that question. Sorry, I'm a bit giddy. Well, you should be. That's when you know you've, you're a success when you have the audio version coming out. Right, I did the audio book of my first book because my grandson wanted to listen to it instead of reading it. I thought, all right, I don't care how you get it. I'm going for it. So that's a wonderful question. The book, by the way, is also, I mean, this is again, now I'm starting to get to the part I'm excited about. The book is gonna be published in Russia. I can hardly believe that. And again, this morning I was approving the final edits of the Russian version of the book. So it's being published in Russian, in Russia. And I'm really excited about that. And again, you know, Crimea is right now celebrating the 100 year anniversary of the flight of the white Russians. It was hundreds of thousands of people left. It was the end of the civil war. And it's a momentous occasion. And in fact, there's an organization that's making a film about it, about the people who were there and my cousin Helen, who I now just saw. And I are gonna be in that video. And we were supposed to be there for it, but needless to say, COVID has us here. But we'll be doing some Zoom events in Russia and in Russian. There's a Russian bookstore that's gonna do one in San Francisco even. To me, that's incredible. That my father's book is gonna be in Russia 100 years after he left. That is wonderful. And you know, as a San Francisco has such a rich Russian heritage that's gotta be really validating for you. There is a question from a listener who grew up in Cold War, during the Cold War in Alaska. And of course, Russia at that time was considered the enemy. And she's just curious how your thoughts are on how that mood might have shifted these days. Well, you know, I think in those days, it was a lot harder to be a Russian. You know, when I was a kid, I've said to people, you know, I would go try to raise money for my girl scout troop. And people would say, a Russian girl scout troop? Why would we wanna give money to the communists? You know, it was just different. But on the other hand, it passed pretty quickly. I mean, that was in the 50s by the 60s. A lot of that had settled down. San Francisco always had, since I've been here, always had a lot of Russians. And so I think that that started shifting pretty quickly. I've had that question asked by other people. And in fact, there's a woman who's doing her PhD paper on it right now. And she's reading my book, and we're gonna be talking about that subject because she said her father had to change his name. I can't remember. I think it was from Boris to an American sounding name because he was having trouble finding work. But, you know, he's considerably older than I am. He would be a hundred right now. So I think that that Cold War period, it was really more the McCarthy period that made it very hard. I hated being a foreign, but that was different from, it was, they were choosing to be Russian and I didn't wanna do that. But it wasn't because, you know, I thought it was sort of bad to be Russian per se. I just didn't wanna be foreign. So you're fluent in Russian then? I am, I am, yep. I discovered in Russia that I'm still fluent in Russian. You grew up speaking Russian in the household? Yeah, so yeah, I had a very unusual household. So my mother was Croatian, okay. My father was Russian. He grew up mostly in Serbia. She grew up in Serbia and Croatia. So she marries this Russian, moves from Zagreb to Belgrade. And we get kicked out of Yugoslavia when I'm six months old. So that's three years after the wedding. My mother didn't speak Russian when she married my father. But she learned it very quickly. Well, they both were committed to making sure the kids knew their language. And in fact, Mother Tong, the book about my mother is about that issue of speaking with her. And that book's been published in Serbo-Croatian and it's called Ponoššamo, which means in our way, in our language. So when I learned how to speak, first of all, I didn't speak for the first two years of my life and everybody in the refugee camp thought it was all my mother's fault because they were all Russian and she insisted I speak Serbian with her. So when I finally started talking, I spoke Serbian with my mother and Russian with my father. And if in the middle of a sentence, I switched my eyes from one face to the other, I changed languages. And that was our lifetime process. I could not speak to her in any other language. I could not speak to him in anything but Russian. So it was a very strange, but I'm fluent in both languages. It was a real gift, a real gift. And you can tell I'm fluent in English reasonably. And I don't have an accent. And what we learned, my friend Tanya came to San Francisco probably about the same time I did. If you were under 10, you did not have an accent. And if you were over 10, you could work for the rest of your life, but you'd never get rid of it. I think it just kind of works that way. I don't know if other people have these experiences. Well, that's an interesting observation. Let's see, Barbara has a question. You discovered many things about your family as you did the research for both mother tongue and 100 years of exile. What's the next mystery that you wanna uncover? I don't know, I don't know. I am working on another book, but I'm not sure I'm gonna publish it. It's a book about walking across England shortly after my husband died. And it's actually why I started writing. So my husband died almost 10 years ago and we walked across England along the Thames Trail with two friends. And I started writing then and I wrote a book about, I thought I was walking across England to heal from my husband's death. And what I learned was when I wrote about walking across England, I started healing from my husband's death. But then what happened was he invaded the book. It started being about walking across England and it's now called Crossing Bridges because it ended up being about crossing bridges in my life and so I got stuck. But I decided I had to learn how to write. That's how I became a writer. So now I may finish that book. Who knows? Maybe I'll travel again someday and I'll write another travel story. I've still got lots of projects and I may just become a photographer again. No pressure, but it's a great premise. All right, Colleen has a question. She says, my Aunt Marina Casey and her son George Casey lived in San Francisco and Aunt Marina's father was also a white Cossack. And she and her family left Russia when Aunt Marina was two. She spoke both French and Russian fluently as does George, who's about your age. Was it common in the Romanov dynasty for people to speak both French and Russian? All right, now we get to what kind of Romanov I am. So I will tell you that when I met Marina, I said to her, I apologize for taking your name as my pen name. It was felt really strange. And she said, oh, Romanov. She said, in Russia, that's like Smith. It's the most common name in Russia. And so I said, oh, okay, I got it. Well, the difference between me and Marina was that my grandmother, Romanov, was a migrant worker. I mean, they were obviously serfs until not very long before she was born. And the royal Romannums, and there are many, many of them, were a different class of people. In Russia, that was what divided the classes. If you were upper class, you spoke French. There was no question. If you were a peasant, you spoke Russian. And so no, we didn't have any friends. I did speak French. I lived in France for two years, but that was not a family trait. Well, if we keep talking, we'll find out how many other languages you speak. Yeah, we will. A few more. Let's see, Elizabeth has a question. Listening as someone whose third or so generation in the United States, she feels on the cusp of that transition and she feels that it is a beautiful homage to how welcoming the country is, the United States. And she's curious about what your thoughts are on, and impressions are on, I guess, the welcoming nature of Americans. You know, obviously, I'll tell you what, I've had more time to think about that in the last four years. I'm sure we all have, you know? And to me, America is a country beyond, you know, any expectations anyone might have. We can say all the nasty things we want, we've done some horrible things, our leadership has done some horrible things, but this is still a country of opportunity. And I mean, I was clearly fortunate in when I came, but it's, I think it's really important to study your roots and in this country, more than any other, you can hold onto them as long as you want. You know, San Francisco, half the people speak Chinese now, they can keep their Chinese. A lot of countries, you know, everybody wants to become native. So I think we're a country that allows you to be who you are. And I'll tell you one thing, over the last months, people started saying, oh my God, I might just have to leave this country. And, or, oh, he's not my president. You know, I mean, there were so many things. And I always said, I'm never leaving this country. And I'm sorry, but we elected him and he's my president because I'm an American. And nothing will make me not an American. I mean, it's like, it's a gift. I talk about this somewhere, I think it's in the book that, so I'm a world traveler. I'm constantly somewhere. I've been to India every year for the last 10 years. I've been to Bangladesh, Myanmar, all over Europe, all over Africa, I love to travel. And here's a really funny thing. I meet Russian people all over, including on the streets of San Francisco, constantly. And I'm always saying, oh yeah, they say, oh, you speak Russian. You must have just left. I said, yeah, a hundred years ago, we left Russia. And every single time I say that, they say, umna zeleli, they did a smart thing. So these are people who live in Russia. Moscow is as fancy as Paris right now. You would not expect to hear somebody say, oh, you're lucky your parents came to the America today, but they still do. We are blessed to be living in this country and I'm gonna start crying if I keep talking about it. So I have had every opportunity in the world. It was worth living in a refugee camp. Glad I finally got my father's forgiveness. I will thank him forever for what he did. Well, that sounds like a, that's a great place to end, I think, I mean, that's amazing. Yeah, I got a bit. No, every now and then you just have to take stock and be thankful about whatever. I mean, I'm constantly thankful to be living in such a cosmopolitan place as the San Francisco Bay Area and cheers. Yeah, cheers, toast to all of you. Well, I wanna thank all of our guests today and I wanna thank you, Tanya, for a wonderful presentation and I'm so glad that I was able to host you. I know we talked about this. Maybe it was your first book or a mother talk. Yes. And then I don't know what happened, but here we are. So I'm really glad that things have come together and that, yeah, and just wanna thank you for sharing your experience. Well, thank you all of you. You know, I can see everybody. The first time I did one of these zooms, they had me stuck in just looking at myself. So thank you all. It's so wonderful to see your faces. Yes, thank you, Colleen, Casey's Clapings Bank. Hi, I don't even know you, Colleen, right? But thank you and Simana Beach. What a wonderful name. See, I wanna talk to you all, Lucy. I can't believe it. Lucy Han from Minnesota now, right? Are you in Colorado? Anyway. People from all over the country and the world. Hey, Rosenberg. I'm gonna go ahead and open it up so people can actually talk to you if you want that. People can turn your mics on if you want and say hi. Helen. Lena, Tanya, where's Tanya? If you want to, you can unmute yourself. Tanya, you can unmute yourself. Tanya and Lena say hello to each other. Hello. Hi. Hi. Oh my God, that's great. Hello, wonderful to see you. Thank you, everyone. Lena, can you say hello? Hello, hello, wonderful presentation. I enjoyed it. Thank you. That's my cousin. And she was in Russia with me and wonderful. Lucy, hi. And Ann, where are you from? San Francisco? San Francisco, yes. But I'm a second generation born here. My mother's family was Ukrainian. My father's family was Russian, which has created a certain amount of friction in the family, but anyway, here I am. There you go, you're gonna have to write your story. I couldn't write a story. It would be full of drama and intended brides who were spurned. And anyway, a lot of that story intended was reflected. Yeah, that's great. Hi, Lorraine. Hi, Tanya. And Kenny, hi. This is great. Thank you, Tanya. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. That's great. Okay. Bye. What should I say to you? It's like being at a party. I'll say the Svidanya. Bye, the Svidanya. All right. Thank you, everyone. All right, and I'll see you around at our next virtual meeting. Yes. It's up there for real. Yes, someday. Bye, Frank. Bye. All right. Thank you, guys.