One Hundred Years of Exile: A Romanov’s Search for Her Father’s Russia - Softcover

Romanov, Tania

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609521951 ISBN 13: 9781609521950

Publisher: Travelers' Tales, 2020

Synopsis

Travelers' Tales

About this title

About the Author

Tania Romanov is a writer and photographer who lives in San Francisco.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1 A Royal Romanov

Meeting a Romanov princess was not on my agenda.

In May of 2018, I launched my first book, about my mother’s Balkan roots, and my stepdaughter Beth hosted an event for me at her home. Outside, spring’s first wildflowers colored the meadows while snow dotted the mountaintops. Inside, friends gathered, and Beth introduced me to the ones I didn’t yet know.

“Tania, this is my friend Aki’s mother, Marina.”

I held out my hand to Marina, and we smiled at each other as strangers do. The introduction was almost an aside, and then Beth suddenly remembered. “Oh! You two can probably speak Russian together!”

Standing before me was an attractive, slender, and gently smiling woman who fit easily into this small mountain town in Colorado―a woman slightly older than I, whose English was as accent-less as mine, and who, unlike me, was a native born American.

I flashed back to a phone conversation some months earlier, when Beth casually mentioned her friend Aki’s sister, Tatiana.

“Your friend’s sister is really called Tatiana?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “Their grandparents were Romanovs. I think they might be Russian princesses.”

“But that’s my name,” I said, in that phone call.

“So you’re also a Tatiana?”

Beth knew, of course, that I am half Russian. Growing up, she shared the traditions of my family in San Francisco. But she didn’t appreciate all the subtleties of the culture inculcated in me by my father Tolya and my grandmother Daria. Papa, like his brother, my Dydya or Uncle Shura, was determined that I should marry a Russian. But that didn’t happen. My late husband Harold―Beth’s father―was as American as they came; born in New Jersey and unfamiliar with even the town in Germany from which his family had emigrated. Indicative of my parents’ failure is the fact that Beth had no idea that I was a Tatiana in my childhood. I never told her about the first grade teacher who eliminated that awkward name from the class roster and thus created Tania.

“Yes,” I replied. “I was once a Tatiana. And is Aki short for Alexandra?”

“Yes...”

This was getting interesting. Sasha, my brother’s name, is a nickname for either Alexander or Alexandra.

I plunged in deeper. “My grandmother was a Romanov too,” I said.

There was a short pause.

“So you're a princess too?” Beth laughed, assuming I was pulling her leg. She knew I was more tomboy than princess, and “Romanov” was another name I had never mentioned.

“I'm afraid my grandmother was as far from being a princess as you could get,” I replied. “Her family were migrant workers. They passed through the village where my grandfather raised wheat.”

“But her last name really was Romanov?”

“Yes, it really was.”

That discussion helped trigger my decision to use the nom de plume Tania Romanov for my writing. And now I realized who the woman standing before me was. This was Marina, née Romanov. I had researched her after my conversation with Beth and knew that Marina, unlike me, was not the granddaughter of a migrant worker, or the descendant of a serf. She is a Royal Romanov―the granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas’s sister Xenia. Yes, she is the closest living survivor of the last Tsar of Russia―the symbol of my grandparents’ flight from Russia, and a myth arising from my past.

“I’m afraid I adopted your last name as my nom-de-plume,” I said, a bit self-consciously.

“Oh, Romanov,” Marina said, with a casual flick of her wrist. “That’s one of the most common names in Russia. It’s like Smith here in America.” For the rest of the evening, I entertained Beth’s friends with my Balkan stories. I was thrilled to share thoughts and memories with Marina, knowing she understood growing up in a Russian émigré family. We agreed to meet up again later.

But Tatiana―a ghost―had suddenly materialized in that space, sharing my body. She was a little Tatiana, raised by papa and Dyadya Shura and a host of Russian friends and relatives. This little Tatiana grew up among homes and churches in San Francisco where portraits of Tsar Nicholas shared a place in household altars right next to crosses with Jesus Christ nailed to them. This little Tatiana spent ten formative years in Russian school studying religion, literature, geography and history. Every course ended with the execution of Tsar Nicholas and his wife and children in a remote corner of the Urals. In that school in San Francisco, every word was spoken in a Russian language that preserved the style and terminology of the early 20th century. Every teaching venerated the destroyed royal family and awaited their return to their rightful place at the head of their country, their Russia.

But that was not for me. I felt trapped in their sphere. I wanted to be an American, not a poor, foreign refugee.

My Dydya Shura often despaired of my desire to flee into an American world; to turn Tatiana into Tania; to leave his Russia behind as quickly as possible. But his world, I was to learn, was planted deep inside me, and now it forced its way back into my consciousness.

How can it be that just as I was thinking of writing about my father and exploring a revolution that threw my grandparents out of Russia, I met a member of the very family whose eradication haunted their flight? A family whose memory was sacred to all those exiles, and to their descendants? How could it be that this meeting happened, not in the Russian Orthodox Cathedral where Shura’s daughter Lena and grandchildren Katya and Kolya still continue his connection to the past, but at the home of my American husband Harold’s daughter Beth, far from Russian churches and schools and meeting halls?

Marina and I both had grandparents who lost everything in the Russian Revolution. We both had fathers who fled that country as children on ships from Crimea a hundred years ago. But she represents so much more than just a shared heritage. She is the embodiment of a royal family that until this moment, for me, had been a myth. Could she help turn a symbol human, and make my grandparents’ story real?

As Marina and I sat in my daughter’s home, my mind flew to the lives of the Russians we grew up with, and stories about my family. I imagined a film that started in a small village in Russia in the early nineteen-hundreds. Marina’s great uncle is Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. My grandmother Daria is still young, a single woman whose father is marrying her off . . .

But, in a connection as incredible as this one, there was another Russian waiting to enter my life at this juncture of history and reality.

Edition details

• Publisher: Travelers' Tales
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1609521951
• ISBN 13: 9781609521950
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352