Tatiana Comes To America

Lila and Rose are going to spend the year with their grandmother, and they are not pleased. Their grandmother dresses like a hippie, she doesn't own a TV, and she runs a doll hospital. But then she begins to tell them the story of a doll named Tatiana... Long ago, Tatiana belonged to Anya, a wealthy Russian girl. When Anya's town became dangerous, her father decided she should go to America. Anya and Tatiana were supposed to be in the first-class section of the ship with family friends, but they ended up in third class -- by themselves. What would happen once they got to Ellis Island? Would Anya and Tatiana be all alone in America? Book jacket.

Lila and Rose's grandmother, who runs a doll hospital, tells them about a doll named Tatiana who had belonged to a Russian girl named Anya, and about Anya's journey from Russia to the United States aboard a big ship.

From a bilingual master of the literary memoir comes this moving and humorous story of losing immigrant baggage and trying to reclaim it for his American future. In this poignant literary memoir, internationally acclaimed author and Boston College professor Maxim D. Shrayer (Waiting for America) explores both material and immaterial aspects of immigrant baggage. Through a combination of dispassionate reportage, gentle irony, and confessional remembrance, Shrayer writes about traversing the borders and boundaries of the three cultures that have nourished him—Russian, Jewish, and American. The spirit of nonconformism and the power of laughter come to the rescue of Shrayer’s autobiographical protagonist when he faces existential calamities and life’s misadventures. The aftermath of a dangerous ski accident in Italy reminds the memoirist of history’s black holes. A haunting, Soviet-era theatrical affair pushes the émigré protagonist to the brink of a disaster in a provincial Russian town. Attempting to collect overdue royalties from a Moscow publisher, the expatriate writer tips his hat to Kafka. The book’s six interconnected tales are held together by the memorist’s imperative to make the ordinary absurd and the absurd—ordinary. Shrayer parses a translingual literary life filled with travel, politics, and discovery—and sustained by family love and faith in art’s transcendence.

The Thirteenth Apostle uncovers a jarring world secret through loss, love and human experience, culminating beyond simple answers and instead in ultimate truth.

The fearless reporter Tatiana Petrovna falls to her death from a sixth-floor window in Moscow the same week that a mob billionaire, Grisha Grigo-renko, is shot and buried with the trappings due a lord. No one else makes the connection, but Arkady is transfixed by the tapes he discovers of Tatiana?s voice describing horrific crimes in words that are at odds with the Kremlin?s official versions.

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours. Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life. Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.

On vacation in Greece, Judith Kahn, a forty-five year old foundation executive from San Francisco, forms a friendship with Tatiana Starova, a foundation grantee from St. Petersburg, Russia. Staying at a converted windmill on an Aegean island, the two women become friends through sharing their life stories. Back in St. Petersburg, Tatiana discovers she is suffering from ovarian cancer. Judith puts together a group of women to help Tatiana -- Kay, Judith's dynamic boss; Gloria, an African-American family practitioner; and Carmen, a Hispanic oncologist. The women bring Tatiana to San Francisco and, with the help of a visiting Russian doctor, Stas Arnatov, shepherd her through treatment with an experimental drug. As each member of the group interacts with Tatiana, she begins, through Tatiana's guidance, to cope with her own life dilemma -- an unsatisfying romance and career; or a past break with family; or a daughter's anorexia; or a lonely personal life. In trying to heal Tatiana, the group members themselves are healed. Although Judith and Tatiana never return to Greece together, they return to the windmill in their hearts and find courage and peace as they face the end of Tatiana's life.