A LETTER TO THE READER
Letter to the Reader
As Gisela Karin Rudolph Maurer Genko Zebroski, I lived many years before I finally understood who I am: a Baltic, German-speaking, Lutheran Russian. These years of researching and writing THE BARONESS have brought me to this conclusion.
Born in Latvia, I spent a happy early childhood in Jelgava prior to World War II. Our German background—which dates back to 1200, when the Teutonic Knights came to what is now Latvia and Estonia—made my parents proud. Over the centuries we created our own culture, a culture that vanished in 1939, when we were obliged to leave the country to escape Soviet persecution. Our family—my mother and her five children, that is (my father was killed in battle)—spent the war years in Poland and fled when the Soviets turned their tanks on Berlin. Eventually we landed in Austria where my mother thanked God that the British had claimed the territory rather than the Russians.
Surviving the aftermath of a major war taught me not only to make ends meet when means were scarce, it provided me with the extraordinary experiences that now inform my writing. I know what it is to be hungry, cold and afraid of those in charge. I know what it is to be a refugee with dreams of a homeland.
In the early 1950s, Germany was overcrowded and in ruins. Home had to be abroad. Any country would do. (This is why Baltic Germans can be found all over the world.) At nineteen I came to California with my first husband, Kurt Maurer, and have lived here ever since. I commute between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, where I settled with my second husband, Alain Genko, and later met my third husband, Edwin Zebroski.
While I adapted to my new identity, my old one remained a puzzle. Talking to family and their friends, I heard stories of survival and mass execution under the Soviets. I learned about the courageous boys who fought for the Baltic Home Front and chased the Bolsheviks out Latvia. I remembered the sophisticated Baltic society I grew up in, and the tales my mother would tell from her childhood. Fascinated by those family histories, I asked her to write them down, and then typed them up for her. They soon became part of my life.
Shortly before my mother’s death, I saw spectacular lights at night. They were real, I was sure about that. I was awake. This vision was telling me something. Suddenly I knew: I must write my mother’s story. The next morning I told her about it and spent the following week recording our interviews. THE BARONESS was born.
At college I took writing classes and attended workshops. I studied English, psychology, behavior, philosophy and literature. It took almost twenty years to write THE BARONESS. My mother would be proud, I think, and though her fictional role as one of the children in the story is small, I hope some day to devote an entire book to her life. Her spirit as a storyteller fills every one of these pages.
The novel begins in the year 1914, when my grandmother was in her prime, a talented singer and parent of five, living in a manor that would be burnt down by the Communist gardener. And on and on it goes. . . .
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