This is the story of Eva Stolar Meltz, a Russian-American woman who emigrated with her family from Chicago, Illinois, in 1931 to the USSR, where for over 40 years she endured life in Communist Russia. This book chronicles a fascinating life that unfolded within tumultuous political, social, and economic circumstances. The perspective of an idealistic young emigrant to the USSR is unusual and provides insight into the Communist movement in Chicago in the 1920s; the preferential treatment emigrants with much-needed skills first received when they arrived in the Soviet Union in the 1930s; the evolution of Communism under Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev; the betrayal by friends during periods of political and social oppression; exile to a collective farm during World War II; the terrifying ordeal of persecution and the brutality of political imprisonment in a labour camp in the 1950s; the difficulty of living day-to-day in a closed society; and the struggle to leave the USSR in the 1970s.
Eva Stolar Meltz was born in 1910 in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants. In 1931, she moved with her parents, brother, and husband to Moscow, USSR. In Moscow, she raised a family and, for many years, taught at the Institute of Cinematography. She left the USSR in the 1970s, moving first to Israel and then to the United States, where she spent her last years with her childhood friend Rae Gunter Osgood in Culver City, California. Rae Gunter Osgood was born in 1910 in Chicago, Illinois. She holds degrees from Crane Junior College, the University of Illinois, and North-western University (MA in Counseling). Ms. Osgood worked in Chicago in the 1930s and early 1940s as a social worker and school teacher, and thereafter taught in the Los Angeles City Schools until retirement. She currently lives in Culver City, California.