May You Live In Interesting Times

I've been busy this Covid winter. While I'm ready to release May You Live In Interesting Times (ISBN 9780578844787) on Monday March 1st from Seattle's Blue Parrot Books, the first volume of a multi-volume family history and archive distilled from nearly 1,000 family photos, letters, and documents that survived two revolutions, a civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression, military coups, an invasion or two, Nazi conscription, and World War II Allied bombing, I'm also working on the first of a three-volume archive of the complete collection of family photos, letters, and documents.

This collection includes documents issued by Russia's post-Tsarist Bolshevik government, the Russian White Army, assorted military officials during the Russian Civil War, the French Consul of Constantinople, the British and French Red Cross Missions in Constantinople, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the German occupation government of Yugoslavia, the Nazi Third Reich, the U.S. Military Government of Germany, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the International Refugee Organization, the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission, the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile, and any number of private refugee relief organizations.

The first volume of this archive, covering the period 1918 to 1945, will be published by Seattle's Blue Parrot Books this spring. Two additional volumes coming later this year will cover the periods 1945 to 1950, when my family resided in displaced persons camps in Kempten, Germany while searching for a new home in a new world, and finally 1950 to 1960 following relocation to Canada and the United States.

I thank my grandfather, Russian Cavalry Captain Vassilij Yakovyevitch Ostrogorsky, for so assiduously, against all odds, collecting and preserving this incredible collection!

Cavalry Captain Vassilij Yakovyevitch Ostrogorsky, right. Crimea, circa 1920.