Olga's Story
Three Continents, Two World Wars and Revolution--One Woman's Epic Journey Throug h the Twentieth Century
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
When Canadian journalist Stephanie Williams set out to discover her Russian grandmother’ s long-lost history, what she unearthed was this stunning, sprawling portrait of a life lived on the grand stage of the 20th century.
Born in remote Siberia in 1900, Olga Yunter was the youngest of five children. As a teenager during the Revolution, she was a courier and arms-runner for the White Russians. After learning of the execution of her brother at the hands of the Red Army, which drew nearer every day, her father sent her to China with rubies and gold sewn into her petticoats. She would never see her family again.
The life of a Russian exile in China meant poverty and fear. But Olga was lucky. She met and married Fred Edney, and gave birth to their daughter, Irina, the author’s mother. But the creeping Japanese occupation and invasion of China forced Olga to flee with Irina to Canada, leaving Fred behind to continue working. For five years she heard almost nothing of her husband, save that he was alive in a Japanese prison camp. At the end of the war she returned to China to find him broken by his internment. The family was driven out of the country for good by the Chinese Revolution in 1949. They settled in Oxford, where Olga and Fred lived out the rest of their days.
Drawing on letters, diaries, government documents, and interviews, Stephanie Williams brings to life this gripping historical drama, sweeping in scope and illuminated by the intimate details of one woman’s extraordinary life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams remembers her grandmother Olga as a warm woman with a sense of humor, but also as a "formidable presence," with "an air of authority, a confidence in her own judgment." In this event-filled biography, Williams, who has been a journalist with the Sunday Times of London, tells of the turbulent life behind that imperious facade. Olga Yunter (1900 1974) had a childhood of relative comfort in her native Siberia, thanks to her father, an enterprising merchant who traded with China. But two of her brothers were killed for opposing the Bolsheviks, and for her own anti-Bolshevik activities she had to flee across the border to China, at the age of 20. There, to achieve some sense of security, she married a man she didn't love, but in 1938 had to flee again with her daughter, this time to Canada, to escape the brutal Japanese occupation. (Her husband, Fred, who was British, spent the war in Japanese prison camps.) Drawing on printed records, letters, memoirs and conversations with Olga and other family members, Williams succeeds in evoking pre WWI Siberia and Tientsin, China. But despite her careful attention to the details of her grandmother's dramatic life, Williams doesn't dig down to Olga's personality or feelings, thus failing to bring Olga herself to life. Illus. Maps not seen by PW.
