I wanted - and still want - to tell my mother's story. She fled Stalin's army in 1944, leaving Latvia, which was to be occupied by the Soviets for the next 50 years, and arrived to the U.S. when she was 11.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement he was sent to teach in military academy in Riga, and I was born then.
In Soviet times, the border was closed, so we couldn't get out of the country, and I had been reading Robinson Crusoe. I wanted to see the ocean, I wanted to see boats, I wanted to see black people, because we didn't have that in the Soviet Union. I was all excited by that stuff.
You read 'Stalingrad' by Antony Beevor because you're interested in the Second World War or Russia or whatever.
My parents separated soon after I was born, so I left Helsinki when I was a year old. My mother took me to Paris and then other places throughout Western Europe.
I escaped from my home country, Bulgaria, to Czechoslovakia and then to the West.
In December of 1952, my first wife, Kirby, and I left Vienna to drive through the Russian sector of Austria into Yugoslavia.
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
In 1979, when I was toddler, the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and my whole family fled to Vienna, Virginia. Far from home, my parents were determined to raise my two sisters and me according to Afghan traditions.
My mom grew up in the Soviet Bloc, and she was a Tiger Mom. We didn't get away with much.
We then came to the Soviet Union. One day we were walking and carrying our banner and distributing a few leaflets in Russian to people, and we met two women on the road.