Olga's Story
by Stephanie Williams
Doubleday, $203
There was little left of Olga Yunter's life after she died in 1974. Her husband built a bonfire outside their Oxford home and burned her books, papers, pictures and albums. Stephanie Williams had only the stories her grandmother told, a few notebooks and a small locket, a religious icon given to Olga's brother in 1915 by the tsarina, Alexandra, as he lay wounded in an army hospital. The locket was Olga's most precious possession.
Born in 1900, she was a refugee for much of her life. To protect her family from the Bolsheviks, she fled Siberia for China, then from the invading Japanese, and finally from the Chinese communists.
Williams, a journalist and author of The Hongkong Bank: The Building of Norman Foster's Masterpiece, took to speculating about her grandmother's early life. 'The more I went over the clues, the more tantalising they became, the more profound her mystery,' Williams writes in the prologue to Olga's Story: Three Continents, Two World Wars and a Revolution - One Woman's Epic Journey Through the Twentieth Century.
After glasnost, and with the help of a Russian postgraduate student at Oxford, she began to explore her grandmother's past. Olga had blocked her making inquiries in 1968, such was her fear that the KGB would punish her family in Russia, even though she had no idea if they were even alive.
