One Hundred Years of Exile: A Romanov's Search for Her Father's Russia
Channel: Mechanics' Institute
Date: 11/11/2020

Join MI author Tania Romanov for a discussion about how her new book One Hundred Years of Exile: A Romanov's Search for Her Father's Russia came to life: the challenges she faced in crafting a family story that took place on two continents and her publication journey.

In One Hundred Years of Exile: In Search of My Father’s Russia San Francisco author Tania Romanov tells the story of her journey through 100 years of history to find peace with her father. Tania and her father were both exiled from their homelands as infants; both knew life in refugee camps. The family’s immigration to San Francisco heralded a promising new future—but while Tania just wanted to be an American, her father could not trust that this was his final asylum. His fears and his resistance to assimilation leave Tania with deep resentment. Decades later, his unexpected death exposes Tania’s open wounds and a host of unanswered questions about her father’s story and her Russian heritage.

A serendipitous meeting with a last surviving member of the Russian royal family, followed by a baffling error that miraculously connects her with unknown relatives, catapults Tania on a quest for answers in her father’s homeland. Tania’s story proves inseparable from Russia’s, featuring Cossacks who fled revolution, a family who survived Stalin, and a family of royal exiles, culminating in a meeting between princess and peasant. One Hundred Years of Exile is a moving story of how revisiting the past can bring not only forgiveness and redemption but something far more powerful as well.

Tania Romanov is an award-winning travel photographer and the author of three books: Mother Tongue: A Saga of Three Generations of Balkan Women; Never a Stranger, a travel story collection; and One Hundred Years of Exile: A Romanov’s Search for Her Father’s Russia (2021). A Solas Award winner, Tania’s work has also been featured in multiple travel anthologies and translated into Serbo-Croatian and Russian. Born in the former Yugoslavia, Tania fled the country and spent her childhood in a refugee camp in Trieste, Italy, before emigrating to the United States. She went through San Francisco’s public schools, U.C. Berkeley, and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, eventually serving as CEO of three technology companies. When not on the road, Tania splits her time between San Francisco and Sonoma County.