My Russian Family
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Narrated by:
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Julian Pearson
About this listen
My Russian Family is a three generation family saga about nine family members, involving love, faith, fidelity, and physic phenomena, as you explore the mysterious world of Mother Russia. Social, political, and historical events were included as a backdrop to this easy reading people history of Russia. The raw reality of life, without the filter of Cold War propaganda, is fascinating as Russian people lived and survived in their everyday life. These stories include Lilias mother, who was a daughter of nobility, and Lilias father, who was a peasant that rose in the ranks to Red Army Intelligence and then to the KGB, where he retired as a Lieutenant Colonel. There are new perspectives of Stalinism, Soviet Power, the Gulag Archipelago, and the KGB, as well as a singular view of historical events, including World War II.
©2009 Lilia M. Brovkina & Robert B. Osland (P)2019 Lilia M. Brovkina & Robert B. OslandListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
In In Order to Live, Yeonmi Park shines a light not just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the deprivation and deception she endured and which millions of North Korean people continue to endure to this day, but also onto her own most painful and difficult memories. She tells with bravery and dignity for the first time the story of how she and her mother were betrayed and sold into sexual slavery in China and forced to suffer terrible psychological and physical hardship before they finally made their way to Seoul, South Korea - and to freedom.
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Wow. What a story!
- By Jfm on 02-01-16
By: Yeonmi Park
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Echoes from the Holocaust
- A Memoir
- By: Mira Ryczke Kimmelman
- Narrated by: Susan Marlowe
- Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The daughter of a Jewish seed exporter, the author was born Mira Ryczke in 1923 in a suburb of the Baltic seaport of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Her childhood was happy, and she learned to cherish her faith and heritage. Through the 1930s, Mira's family remained in the Danzig area despite a changing political climate that was compelling many friends and neighbors to leave. With the Polish capitulation to Germany in the autumn of 1939, however, Mira and her family were forced from their home.
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4.5* - memoir of a survivor
- By Christine Newton on 06-09-17
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The Aquariums of Pyongyang
- By: Chol-hwan Kang, Pierre Rigoulot
- Narrated by: Stephen Park
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Amid escalating nuclear tensions, Kim Jong-un and North Korea's other leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party state, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for "re-education". Kang Chol-Hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in North Korea.
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Riveting!!
- By Iread on 11-12-20
By: Chol-hwan Kang, and others
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Secondhand Time
- The Last of the Soviets
- By: Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich - translator
- Narrated by: Amanda Carlin, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre", describing her work as "a history of emotions - a history of the soul". Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
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The Heart, Soul & Iron Fist Of Russia
- By Sara on 02-22-17
By: Svetlana Alexievich, and others
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Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden
- Two Sisters Separated by China’s Civil War
- By: Zhuqing Li
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Scions of a once-great southern Chinese family that produced the tutor of the last emperor, Jun and Hong were each other’s best friends until, in their twenties, they were separated at the end of the Chinese Civil War. One became a model Communist, the other a model capitalist. On Taiwan, Jun married a Nationalist general, established a trading company, and emigrated to the United States. On the Communist mainland, Hong built her medical career under a cloud of suspicion about her family and survived two waves of “re-education” before she was acclaimed for her achievements.
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Wonderful Story of a Family’s Survival Through Political Change…
- By Marie G. on 04-12-23
By: Zhuqing Li
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I Am a Bacha Posh
- My Life as a Woman Living as a Man in Afghanistan
- By: Ukmina Manoori, Stephanie Lebrun, Peter E. Chianchiano - translator
- Narrated by: Ariana Delawari
- Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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"You will be a son, my daughter." With these stunning words Ukmina learned that she was to spend her childhood as a boy. In Afghanistan there is a widespread practice of girls dressing as boys to play the role of a son. These children are called bacha posh: literally "girls dressed as boys." This practice offers families the freedom to allow their child to shop and work - and in some cases, it saves them from the disgrace of not having a male heir. But in adolescence, religion restores the natural law.
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Good story, awful pronunciation
- By Anonymous User on 04-19-21
By: Ukmina Manoori, and others
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Invisible Jews
- Surviving the Holocaust in Poland
- By: Eddie Bielawski
- Narrated by: Norman Gilligan
- Length: 2 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Eddie Bielawski was born in the town of Wegrow in Poland in mid-1938. Not a propitious time and place for a Jewish child to be born. As a young child, he sees the Nazi army marching toward Russia. Day and night they marched - soldiers, trucks, tanks, and more soldiers, in a never-ending line - an invincible force. One night, his father had a dream. In this dream, he saw what he had to do: where to build the bunker, how to build it, and even its dimensions. This would be their Noah's Ark, saving them from the initial deluge.
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Surviving not the camps, but being in hiding!
- By Logophile on 04-26-18
By: Eddie Bielawski
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My Mother's Secret
- Based on a True Holocaust Story
- By: J. L. Witterick
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 2 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Franciszka and her daughter, Helena, are simple, ordinary people until 1939, when the Nazis invade their homeland. Providing shelter to Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland is a death sentence, but Franciszka and Helena do exactly that. In their tiny home in Sokal, they hide a Jewish family in a loft above their pigsty, a Jewish doctor with his wife and son in a makeshift cellar under the kitchen, and a defecting German soldier in the attic - each party completely unknown to the others.
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WONDERFUL!!!
- By Robyn Collins on 02-29-16
By: J. L. Witterick
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Dancing with the Enemy
- My Family's Holocaust Secret
- By: Paul Glaser
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster, Christa Lewis
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The gripping story of the author's aunt, a Jewish dance instructor who was betrayed to the Nazis by the two men she loved, yet managed to survive WWII by teaching dance lessons to the SS at Auschwitz. Her epic life becomes a window into the author's own past and the key to discovering his Jewish roots.
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Amazing Unique
- By Nordic Artisan on 05-11-19
By: Paul Glaser
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Mao's Last Dancer
- Young Readers' Edition
- By: Li Cunxin
- Narrated by: Paul English
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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One day, not so very many years ago, a small peasant boy was chosen to study ballet at the Beijing Dance Academy. His mother urged him to take this chance of a lifetime. But Li was only eleven years old and he was scared and lonely, pushed away from all that he had ever known and loved. He hated the strict training routines and the strange place he had been brought to. All he wanted to do was go home - to his mother, father, and six brothers, to his own small village. But soon Li realised that his mother was right. He had the chance to do something special with his life - and he never turned back.
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Happiness rising from the injustise
- By Natasha on 10-29-13
By: Li Cunxin
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A Lucky Child
- A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy
- By: Thomas Buergenthal
- Narrated by: Thomas Buergenthal, Don Hagen
- Length: 5 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir, A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life.
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Compelling Account
- By Simone on 04-23-15
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Mosaic
- By: Diane Armstrong
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 19 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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>i>Mosaic is compelling storytelling at its best - from the fascinating details of Polish-Jewish culture and the rivalries and dramas of family life, to its moving account of lives torn apart by war and persecution, this an extraordinary true story of a family, and of one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage.
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Absolutely excellent!
- By Roberta on 09-22-11
By: Diane Armstrong