RAS BOOK CLUB
Monday 2 September 2013 at 7:00 pm
Venue: The Apartment, 4/F The Study
No. 47 YongFu Lu (between FuXing and WuYuan Lu)
永福路47号3楼, 近复兴西路.
A special RAS Book Club event will be held with the authors of:
RUSSIAN AT HEART: Sonechka's Story
by Olga and John Hawkes
Published by: Wily Publications
ISBN 978-0-90582923-3-7
256 pages with 75 family photos (Russia & Shanghai) c.1890-1948
Copies of the book will be available at this event.
Entrance: RMB 70.00 (RAS Members) and RMB 100.00 (non-members) including a drink (tea, coffee, soft drink, or glass of wine). Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to this RAS Book Club event. Member applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.
N.B. RESERVATIONS ESSENTIAL AS SPACE IS LIMITED AT THIS EVENT.
THE BOOK (from www.olgahawkes.co.nz)
“I hope that someone, someday will read this and know what I have suffered.”
Sonechka Balk
The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 shattered the lives of all Russians. Russian at Heart is the story of one such family set in an era made famous in the novel and film, Dr Zhivago.
Sonechka Balk was born into a gentry family in the Crimea in 1904. She is the youngest of four children. World War I and the revolution tear her family apart; relationships are destroyed by events beyond her control. As an orphaned teenager, Sonechka is forced to work for Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB, counting bodies of those who have died of starvation and those murdered by the Bolsheviks.
After many narrow escapes and chased by the Cheka, Sonechka flees on the Trans-Siberian railway to China.
Her dream is to go to America to join Sasha, her White Army officer brother. This is shattered by new U.S. immigration restrictions passed in 1924. She is stranded in Shanghai, the world’s most cosmopolitan city, between the wars. Several people help her, including Duncan Kerr and Lara von Schneider. Sasha had saved the life of Duncan’s brother, a British officer, when they were fighting the Red Army in Siberia.
Sonechka’s future husband, Vladimir Rossi, a multi-lingual ex-Imperial Horse Guards officer, arrives in Shanghai in 1929. Badly wounded towards the end of the Civil War, he was evacuated from the Crimea to Constantinople (Istanbul). He had attended the elite Corps des Pages military academy in St Petersburg. In 1913, during the Romanov dynasty’s tercentenary celebrations, he was an equerry to Tsar Nicholas' daughter, the Grand Duchess Princess Tatyana.
Sonechka and Vladimir meet and marry in Shanghai where they raise their family. Their remarkable resourcefulness enables them to survive in this war-torn city during the 1930s and, in particular, the Japanese occupation during World War II.
The rich storehouse of stories that Olga heard from Sonechka, her mother, and Dora, her aunt, along with their memoirs form the basis of this book. It is a unique account of how a family survived some of the twentieth century’s greatest upheavals.
THE AUTHORS (from www.olgahawkes.co.nz)
Olga Hawkes
Olga was born in Shanghai in 1942 during the Japanese occupation when Sonechka, her mother, was nearly 40 and her father, Vladimir nearly 50.
In 1948, Olga, aged five, fled communist China to America with her sister and mother. On finishing High School in San Francisco, Olga went to Europe to visit relatives. In Paris, she got an au pair job and then studied at the Sorbonne.
In 1962 Olga met John at the American Hospital of Paris where they were both working. They married in Paris that same year.
Olga wrote Russian at Heart from the rich legacy of stories and memoirs left to her by Sonechka, her mother. Olga’s Christchurch born husband, John, with his great love of history assisted her in writing this book.
John Hawkes
After completing his post graduate medical studies overseas, John returned to New Zealand with Olga and their children for seven years. In 1974 John became the consultant rheumatologist at Bedford Hospital, England. Since 2002 Olga and John have lived in Christchurch, New Zealand, John’s home town. The history buff, John, is a former New Zealand athletics champion and decathlete.