Standing at the crossroads of autobiography and contemporary history, Paulina’s memoir presents an intimate and bittersweet portrait of the coming of age of a fiercely independent Jewish girl, raised by her father, a former sea captain, in the Black Sea city of Odesa, Ukraine during and after Stalin’s last decade of Soviet power.
At the age of two, Paulina lost her mother in the less known second forced starvation in Ukraine in 1947, but the tender and loving relationship with her father served as her guide through the dangerous and dark period of Soviet history. Interwoven with her childhood narrative of a streetwise kid, deftly dodging the suffocating strictures of Communist tyranny, is a Cold War thriller arising from Paulina’s involvement with a top-secret Soviet submarine base in Cuba, the indignity of attempted rape, the relentless pressure from the KGB to become their informer, and her desperate plans of escape to freedom.
The Soviet base in Cienfuegos was home to a fleet of Soviet nuclear subs armed with cruise missiles equipped with nuclear warheads aimed at America. Concealed from the Western public and hidden beneath the ocean, this Soviet submarine base served as a major nuclear-armed missile platform in the backyard of the United States where it operated secretly and in defiance of international treaties for over 20 years, but the domestic political considerations during the Vietnam War kept the US Government silent until Russia closed it in 1992.
The secret second Soviet Navy nuclear adventure threatening a confrontation with the United States dramatically affected the lives of Paulina, her husband, and their two small children. It describes how and why Paulina was co-opted to work as a translator for a top-secret project building a naval base in Cuba for Soviet submarines equipped with nuclear warhead missiles, camouflaged as a new civil cargo port in Cienfuegos.
This is an emotional, suspenseful, and vivid tale about the virus of despotic oppression, the wars of disinformation, the perils of the Soviet security agencies, the protective love of a wise father for his daughter, and the bravery and good fortune of a young mother with two small children.
