A story of love and commitment even in the presence of overwhelming odds. A story of one man and one woman. One American, the other Ukrainian. The man travels to Ukraine to meet the woman he has corresponded with through an international marriage agency. They meet and fall in love. He returns home engaged, but soon the woman seems to mysteriously change her mind. He cannot understand what has happened and cannot get over the feeling she does not really want to end this relationship. Without even an agreement that she will meet with him, he returns to Ukraine to solve the mystery and save the relationship with the woman he loves. He is not prepared for what is to be the answer to this mystery, an answer that will repeatedly test his love and commitment.
Today, 1913 is inevitably viewed through the lens of 1914: as the last year before a war that would shatter the global economic order and tear Europe apart, undermining its global pre-eminence. Our perspectives narrowed by hindsight, the world of that year is reduced to its most frivolous features -- last summers in grand aristocratic residences -- or its most destructive ones: the unresolved rivalries of the great European powers, the fear of revolution, violence in the Balkans. In this illuminating history, Charles Emmerson liberates the world of 1913 from this "prelude to war" narrative, and explores it as it was, in all its richness and complexity. Traveling from Europe's capitals, then at the height of their global reach, to the emerging metropolises of Canada and the United States, the imperial cities of Asia and Africa, and the boomtowns of Australia and South America, he provides a panoramic view of a world crackling with possibilities, its future still undecided, its outlook still open. The world in 1913 was more modern than we remember, more similar to our own times than we expect, more globalized than ever before. The Gold Standard underpinned global flows of goods and money, while mass migration reshaped the world's human geography. Steamships and sub-sea cables encircled the earth, along with new technologies and new ideas. Ford's first assembly line cranked to life in 1913 in Detroit. The Woolworth Building went up in New York. While Mexico was in the midst of bloody revolution, Winnipeg and Buenos Aires boomed. An era of petro-geopolitics opened in Iran. China appeared to be awaking from its imperial slumber. Paris celebrated itself as the city of light -- Berlin as the city of electricity. Full of fascinating characters, stories, and insights, 1913: In Search of the World before the Great War brings a lost world vividly back to life, with provocative implications for how we understand our past and how we think about our future.
PREFACE Neither our old nest, our shanty house, nor the piece of the picture I drew in the cellar is left. Years take everything away from a person. This is me, who engraved a memory inside me. It is something that neither years nor anything else can remove. As you grow, your memories grow with you, take shape, become more valuable as you grow, and in the end you cannot hold it in your hand. While you think it is just a simple scribble, it becomes the center of your life, in the middle of your chest, everything valuable is deep inside you. Love is a deep pain that no one can name. There are those that are lost in silence as much as those that are written and drawn. The socks I always pull up to my knees are Esem , the brand I wear on my feet. My cellar, where I used to run by clicking the heels of my sneakers, which I call Sport , where I used to rest my head at that age; full of mice, insects, thin long snakes. My cellar, my coal cellar, my wood cellar... my notebook where I started to scribble my memories is here. My fatherless childhood, where I unknowingly perhaps drew the lines of my destiny, my fatherless seven-year-old maturity... When I lost my father, I started to love my mother very much, and I started to love her instead of my father. My mother was half of a longing. My father was hidden in her eyes, hair, cheeks, conversations, cries, joys, silences, and even despair. He loved me and all my siblings as two people, both as a mother and a father. I also distributed the love I received from him, starting from primary school. In primary school, I first loved my class teacher, a lady teacher named Sezgin Alpaslan. When she took scissors from my face and gave me a big kiss, I learned to be embarrassed and embarrassed. I fell in love! I was embarrassed, I sweated, but I loved her. Then she left, my love remained in my little heart. In my teacher's absence, I sought solace in my mother's warm embrace after school. She wiped my tears from my face and cheeks with her beautiful, delicate hands. She said that I would love my new teacher too, that all the teachers in our country were a separate value. When my teacher Hamide Sapancılar came, the same warm attitude, the same motherly compassion was enough to make me fall in love with her, of course. In those years, teachers were like mothers and fathers. They were doing the greatest and most beautiful social support so gently that you wouldn't understand. I loved them so much, but as I grew up, it was time to leave. I moved on to middle school, took off my black apron and put on a suit and tie. My teacher Hamide disappeared like a cloud of dust. Other teachers took her place. I loved them all. I fell in love with each and every one of them. At home, the love of my mother and siblings was overwhelming to me. My mother had taught me to share, and I shared my love. I fell in love with my peers, Yasemin, Filiz, Müge… I fell in love with all of them. I loved them from afar without touching any of them like a sacred icon. I fell in love by scattering the love I received from my mother and my family. They fell in love with me, I didn’t care. Temporary loves that didn’t resemble the girl I drew in the cellar… My heart was moving along the drawn route. Life opened up causes and effects, and jobs that led to effects. My path began to cross country borders. It would be an exaggeration to say that there was almost no city in my country that I hadn’t visited, no district, village or town that I hadn’t entered and exited, but I had traveled a lot for work. The picture I had drawn in the pantry had disappeared, but its traces in my heart had not been erased despite the passing of years. My mother used to say that people are created in pairs. She still defends the same thing. Everyone looks for their other half and when they find it, they become a person, she said. The roads got longer. They twisted and went all the way to Algeria. I continued to love. I grew up a lot, I became like a father. I became a pillar to my home, a trust to my province. Then the goals changed. The struggle for bread took precedence over love. I couldn’t find love in Algeria. I wasn’t looking for it anymore anyway. I earned money, I got stronger, my voice started to come out, my throat widened, I gained confidence in my body. My family came to peace. Then my Algerian adventure ended. I came back. With a few French words in my mind and memories of a tropical region with money in my pocket and an empty heart… And soon the same misery that I was no stranger to. I was living as someone who had reached the age of 28, who carried life on his back and felt it in his palms. Now, real life, the rush to live had taken away the thought of love from me. What love? What sentimentality? What love? Life was difficult and arduous. I struggled, I struggled, I was hardworking. I passed the exams opened by the state. Winning was not enough, I also needed favoritism. I was left incomplete, I was broken, I was hurt, I was devastated. I could not find a solid job at any point in my life just to live, to stay on my feet, to support my family until this age. Does a person hate the place he was born in? When he is hungry, when he cannot fulfill his future goals, when he cannot see tomorrow, when he is alone, when everything is against him. In the world of the wicked, I opened my hands in prayer to God. I prayed, crying out from the depths of my heart. I rubbed my hands on my face!.. I prayed with my mother for both myself and the dead while visiting the graves in the cemetery. Then a wind blew. The trees turned the summer heat into coolness. Peace filled my insides and my heart. Something was obviously going to happen. "Love embraces you, then leaves you motionless. Everything happens like a spider catching its prey. Even if you desperately want to escape in the middle of the web, you can't escape in vain!"
In My Life through My Dresses, the first book in A Journey of a Recovering Idealist series, Marina Berkovich describes her life under the yoke of Soviet Union, and shares what she learned about the totalitarian government that raised humans as dysfunctional beings. Berkovich weaves her miniature epics of personal survival into a wise and compassionate story of historical value, adding a new dimension to the understanding of Russian history. The story will soon continue with In the Land of the Freed, detailing Marinas many adventures in her early days in USA, and My Life through Their Dresses, a heartbreaking account of tribulations Marinas family members underwent during revolutions, wars, Perestroika and immigration.
A distinctive writer’s fascinating journey into the heart of a troubled region, tracing the origins of the war that is now tearing Europe apart. Each time Ukraine has rebuilt itself over the last century, it has been plagued by the same conflicts: corruption, poverty, and, most of all, Russian aggression. Sophie Pinkham saw all this and more during ten years in Ukraine and Russia, a period that included the Maidan revolution of 2013–14, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the ensuing war in Donbass. With a keen eye for the dark absurdities of post-Soviet society, Pinkham presents a dynamic account of contemporary Ukrainian life. She meets—among others—a charismatic doctor helping to smooth the transition to democracy even as he struggles with drug dependence; a band of Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian hippies in a Crimean idyll; and a Jewish clarinetist agitating for Ukrainian liberation. These fascinating personalities, rendered in a bold, original style, deliver an indelible impression of a country on the brink. Black Square is necessary reading for anyone who wishes to learn the roots of the current Russo-Ukrainian war and the stories of the people who live it every day.
This book offers a historical analysis of the geopolitical and geoeconomic competition between the USA and Russia, which has recently heated up again due to the eastward expansion of NATO. The analysis departs from an exploration of the USA’s foreign policy and geopolitical ambitions by illustrating the influence of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex on the country’s political decision-making. The historical review covers a wide timespan, from the Second World War and the birth of NATO, to the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, to the rebellions that erupted in Eurasia, Northern Africa and the Middle East in the 2010’s, as well as the wars in the Ukraine and in Syria. By doing so, it reveals the influence of US neocons, the US intelligence services and the military complex on the Arab Spring, the Color Revolutions and the armed conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. Ultimately, the book depicts a new era of worldwide instability and disorder, dominated by violence and arbitrariness.
A historical account of World War I literature. Hell on Earth is the second book written by Avigdor Hameiri (born Feuerstein; 1890–1970) about his experiences as a Russian prisoner of war during the second half of World War I. Translator Peter C. Appelbaum first became interested in Hameiri’s story after learning that one quarter of the Austro-Hungarian army was captured and imprisoned, and that the horrific events that took place at this time throughout Russia and central Asia are rarely discussed in scholarly texts. Available for the first time to an English-speaking audience, this reality-driven novel is comparable to classics like All Quiet on the Western Front and The Gulag Archipelago. The text is deeply tragic, while allowing some humor to shine through in the darkest hour. The reader is introduced to a procession of complex characters with whom Hamieri comes into contact during his imprisonment. The narrator watches his friends die one by one until he is released in 1917 with the help of Russian Zionist colleagues. He then immigrates to Israel in 1921. Hameiri’s perspective on the things surrounding him—the Austro-Hungarian Army, the Russian people and countryside, the geography of Siberia, the nascent Zionist movement, the Russian Revolution and its immediate aftermath—offers a distinct personal view of a moment in time that is often overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust. In his preface, Appelbaum argues that World War I was the original sin of the twentieth century—without it, the unthinkable acts of World War II would not have come to fruition. With an introduction by Avner Holtzman, Hell on Earthis a fascinating, albeit gruesome, account of life in prison camps at the end of the First World War. Fans of historical fiction and war memoirs will appreciate the historic value in this piece of literature.
This memoir and literary travelogue from one of the UK’s most esteemed novelists offers rare insight into Cold War–era Russia. In 1967, seeking an escape from his writing life, bestselling British novelist Alan Sillitoe embarks on a road trip from England to Russia via Harwich and Finland in his sturdy Peugeot. During his teens, the author had a cartographic fascination with the Battle of Stalingrad, and decades later he is still armed with intricate maps of the country based on British military intelligence, including one of the road from Leningrad to Moscow to Kiev, which he drew himself. Also in tow are a prismatic compass, binoculars, and a shortwave radio receiver. However, despite being so well prepared, Sillitoe embarks with naiveté about the political precariousness of an Englishman in the eyes of the Soviet regime. After passing through the endless days of a Scandinavian summer and a prolonged stop at a border control checkpoint—with his maps hidden in a secret compartment of the car—Sillitoe arrives in Leningrad. There, he meets George Andjaparidze, a worldly and candid English student who has been assigned by the Writers’ Union to serve as the author’s guide and keep him out of trouble. Though Sillitoe would rather continue his journey solo, Andjaparidze grows on him, and they begin what will become a lasting friendship. As soon as the duo leaves Leningrad, adventures and misadventures ensue. En route to Moscow, Sillitoe and Andjaparidze end up racing a pack of middle-age men in German sports cars partaking in a Berlin-to-Moscow rally. Sillitoe and Andjaparidze’s time in the capital is equally fast-paced, consisting of late nights fueled by vodka, impounded rubles, caviar breakfasts, erudite parties, and a pat on the back from a traffic cop for writing about the working class. A winding drive across western Russia and into Yugoslavia follows, replete with rebellious literature students, a speech on freedom, a visit to Tolstoy’s estate, accusations of espionage, and a near-fatal run-in with a brigade of Red Army tanks. At last the writer and guide reach their destination: Kursk, that fateful place where a Soviet victory in 1943 turned back the Nazi tide. But the story continues long after the road trip ends. Back in England, Andjaparidze visits Sillitoe and the two are caught up in a controversy surrounding the defection of the Soviet writer Anatoly Kuznetsov. Written from the perspective of another trip to Russia forty years later (Sillitoe was invited in 2005 by the British Council to return to Moscow), this travelogue provides a rare and intimate look at the country’s history, a compassionate understanding of its troubled ideology, and a frank portrayal of its undeniable lure.
