Death Of A Past Life

Three generations face the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century--the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, the vicious arbitrariness of Stalin's purges, mass famine during the Siege of Leningrad, the bombing of Berlin during the Nazi's final days--and relentlessly fight to insure the survival of their family. Robert Reincke bases his historical novel on the reminiscences of both his mother and his centenarian grandmother. His own family history is thoroughly investigated and transformed in this imaginative work that allows us to glimpse what it was like to live through events we read about in history books.

Death of a Past Life, written by Robert N. Reincke, MBA and edited by known historian of the Russian Stalinist Period and Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Stephen Herzog Ph.D., is the true story of an elite German-Russian family's horrific travails from the burgeoning of the St. Petersburg Bloody Sunday Massacre of 1905, through pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg and elitist Tsarskoe Selo, to the Russian countryside in the Lenin pre-Stalin era, through Yaraslavl, back through Leningrad and near death through the Siege to a desperate evacuation to the Caucuses, and to Germany via Berlin and the countryside, finally ending in impoverished immigration to Ellis Island in 1949. Actual photos of this family illuminate the era they lived in as they experience first the grandiosity, and then the horrors created by their country's leaders and followers. The book is flavored with research of the intricacies, some forgotten, of the world as it was. It is fraught with the external chaos caused by no less than two World Wars and a Revolution that threw an entire civilization into fear and flight. The scenes, settings, and events of this classic, Russian epic are not imaginary. They are real. And the tyranny of the period in which this story took place is neither that long ago nor that far flung from the potential of what we can recreate.