REMEMBER

by James Lincoln Warren

I am sometimes asked why I write historicals.

My mother-in-law Nadeshda (“Hope”) Dmitrievna Semyannikoff1 grew up in Rostov-on-the-Don, just to the northeast of the Crimean Peninsula, in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Her father, a local attorney who specialized in arbitration, was arrested by the OGPU, the precursor to the Cold War’s KGB, and died in a Siberian Gulag labor camp when she was still a young girl. When the Nazis invaded Russia in 1941, they bombed Rostov preparatory to their occupation of the city. One such bomb landed across the street from where she lived. The explosion lifted the young Nadia off her feet from where she was standing in the family living room, and threw her through the front door into the hall beyond. Because she miraculously landed in the hall instead of being hurled against the far wall, the splinters of glass that filled the room like a storm cloud from the exploding windows missed her and did not cut her to ribbons.

When the Nazis moved in, she and her mother were taken prisoner and became forced laborers. By the end of the war, they had traveled all the way to Munich. In 1949, she and her mother received immigration visas to the United States. Nadia’s first job in America was as a janitor in the mental ward of a San Francisco hospital, but because of her training — back in the USSR, she had attended the local Pedagogical Institute with the intention of becoming a teacher of Russian literature — and her natural gifts, she eventually got a job instructing Russian to U.S. Army officers at the Army Language School (now the Defense Language Institute) in Monterey, California. There she met Alexander Vladimirovich Pavlov2, a fellow Russian immigrant who had worked as an electrical engineer in Shanghai until the Communist takeover forced all foreigners out of China. They married, and my wife Margaret was born in 1952.

In 1955, the family moved to Los Angeles, where Alex had again found work as an engineer in an electrical power plant. Because Nadia had received her college education in the Soviet Union, no American university would accept her earned college credits. Undaunted, she enrolled at Cal State Los Angeles, and then transferred to UCLA. There she earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Russian literature. While working on her Ph.D. at UCLA, she was offered a position teaching Russian at the University of Southern California. She decided to take the job rather than complete her doctorate. She continued to teach Russian to USC students until her retirement, and was still on the faculty when Margaret was enrolled there to work on her Ph.D. in English literature. (Like her mom, Margaret earned both a B.A. and an M.A. at UCLA. Also like her mom, Margaret never completed her Ph.D., choosing instead to attend law school—and I’m very glad she did, because if Margaret hadn’t gone to law school, she would never have become a JAG in the U.S. Navy, and she and I would never have met.)

One December 7 many years ago, Nadia had a morning class. She asked them, “What is important about today’s date?”

No one raised a hand. No one spoke a word. Instead, Nadia was confronted with a fog of bovine stares.

“Shame on you!” she told her budding young scholars. “I grew up in the Soviet Union, but even I know about Pearl Harbor!”

And that’s why I write historicals.

1. This is how her name was transcribed into English when she moved to the U.S. A more accurate transliteration from the Russian would be “Nadiezhda Dmitrievna Semyannikova” (where “zh” is a voiced “sh” or soft “j” sound). The accent is on the second syllable: nah-DYEZH-da. She doesn’t like it very much, regarding it as too ethnic, and goes by either “Nadia” or “Dina”, both common Russian diminutives for her name. [↩]
2. “Alexander” is the English equivalent of the Russian “Aleksandr”. It’s a common name in Russia—several of the Czars were named Alexander—and it is rarely transliterated directly, especially since the English equivalent is so close. In Shanghai, he worked with Englishmen and was used to being called “Alex”, but among his Russian friends, he was called “Shura”. Margaret, who passes for Scottish in Scotland and Austrian in Austria, inherited her gift for languages from him—he spoke English with a flawless idiomatic American accent, and unless you knew better, you’d never have known that English was not his native tongue. [↩]