MEMOIRS

About the Book

This book vividly portrays the bitter trials of life in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. It is a story of the author’s recollections of abject poverty and total intimidation in which his terrified parents and villagers lived under the dictatorships of the Soviet Union from the forcible collectivization to the advent of World War II, and of the Nazi Germany during the temporary German occupation of the Caucasus. The author rebelled against the heartrending and unforgettable mistreatment of the people by both dictatorships during the war. This frequently endangered his life and forced him to flee, leaving behind everything dear to him—friends, relatives, parents, native village, and country. Thus he wandered through Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Italy, at times as a hunted fugitive. He survived the war and two forcible repatriations back to the Soviet Union—first from Austria, and then from Italy; then he moved to Jordan, lived there for eight years, and finally immigrated to the United States of America in 1956. Mr. Natho found shelter in the best and freest country in the world. The book is highly interesting, informative, and easy to read. It is filled, not only with the cruelties and horrors of the war and dictatorships, but also with human passion, kindness, heroism, and love. It will enrich your soul and experience.

About the Author

Kadir I. Natho was born, in 1927, in Hatramtook, Caucasus, one of the eleven children of Ishaq and Goshmafa Natkho—his Circassian (Adygha) parents. He became a refugee in 1943, surviving World War II, lived in Europe for years, and moved to Jordan in 1948. He immigrated from Amman to the United States in 1956 and settled in New York City in 1959, where he acquired “G. A. Press” and published his own bilingual magazine Circassian Star, in English and Circassian. He wrote a collection of short stories, Old and New Tales of the Caucasus, in 1969; a novel, Nicholas and Nadiusha, in 1978, translated into Russian and Circassian in 1993. He wrote a three-act play, Medeia, in Circassian, for the State Theater of the Republic of Adigey, which is scheduled to open in Maikop in April 2009.