Tamar has always loved telling stories and started
writing for fun as a teenager. Her favorite historical figures are the
Romanovs, and she has written four novels about them. Perhaps this is
natural, as she is the great-granddaughter of immigrants of mostly
Russian origin. Tamar has also published a short story collection set in
the Old West, The Lonely Spirit, which she turned into an audiobook
last fall. When she isn’t writing, Tamar attends to her day job as a
maritime and international trade lawyer.
I write historical fiction to tell untold stories, and to tell stories of what might have been. I’ve always found fertile ground for this in Russian history, and in the Romanovs in particular.
I first became interested in the Romanovs after my mom bought me a biography of Rasputin. Russia fascinated me because of its vastness and contradictions. At the height of the Romanov empire, the country spanned one sixth of the world’s landmass and eleven time zones from Moscow to St. Petersburg all the way to Vladivostok and the Pacific Ocean. The diversity in the population, too, was enormous, both in terms of differences in wealth and class and in terms of religions and lifestyles. I drew on all of this in writing my novel in short stories, Tales of the Romanov Empire.
The Romanovs ruled for over three hundred years, but only a few of them are well known. Many people know Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra and their son, the hemophiliac Alexei. Fewer people know Tsar Mikhail, the first Romanov tsar- or that Mikhail was elected to the throne after sixteen years of civil war. Few people know that Mikhail and his son, Alexei, both came to the throne when they were only sixteen. They also both held bride shows to find wives.
I started writing historical fiction because I wanted to tell these types of stories. In writing specific chapters about so many of the Romanovs, I loved imagining the details of each event -- how did the shadows in the Kremlin move across Alexei’s face? How cold was the palace when Mikhail awoke at four a.m. for the first religious service of the day?
I also found Mikhail’s ambassadors fascinating. The gifts he received from Iranian shahs and Ottoman sultans meant that the world was interconnected in the 1600s in ways we don’t hear much about today.
In addition, learning that the Grand Duke Alexei, one of Alexander II’s sons, visited America and hunted out west with Buffalo Bill was incredible to me. The juxtaposition of lands and cultures was as evident in Alexei’s travels as it was between Mikhail and his ambassadors. Each of these stories became their own chapter in Tales of the Romanov Empire.
But the Grand Duke Alexei was not the only connection between the Romanovs and America for me. My great-grandparents emigrated out of Eastern Europe, and all but one came from Romanov territory. It is no secret that the Romanovs were virulently anti-Semitic, and their laws reflected that. There were statutes dictating where Jews could live (in the famous Pale of Settlement, for example) and laws that forced Jews into the Romanovs’ army for a 25-year period. This was often a life sentence. Given that, and coupled with pogroms directed at Jews, it is no wonder that so many of them sought the safety and freedom of American shores.
My great-grandfather, Wolf Anolic, was one of the people who fled. I grew up on family stories about his running from conscription into the Russian army, and of his arriving in New York City alone before he brought the rest of the family over. When I set out to write a book about the whole of the Romanov empire, I knew I would have to include a few chapters about him. It was magical to locate Wolf’s immigration record at Ellis Island, and to find pictures of the ship he sailed on to get there. Those chapters proved to be some of the more gratifying ones I wrote.
The Romanovs’ pogroms also have echoes in the spasms of violence we’re seeing in the world now. That is another aspect of why I write historical fiction- so many of today’s problems have historical roots. We need to learn about the past and tell its stories in order to find solutions now.
Of course, my
fascination with the Romanovs also harkens back to the tragedy of the Russian
Revolution, and what the Romanovs could have done to avoid it. At the same
time, I always wondered what kind of tsar Alexei, Nicholas II’s son, would have
been. That’s why I wrote my other novels about the Romanovs -- the three
alternate historical books in the Triumph of a Tsar series, which were
published several years ago. I wanted to explore what might have been, and
writing those novels was a satisfying way of doing that.
Blog host Helena P. Schrader is an award-winning novelist, the author of six non-fiction and twenty historical fiction books. Her current project in a three-part series about the Berlin Airlift.
The first two volumes of the Bridge to Tomorrow Trilogy are now available.
The first battle of the Cold War is about to begin....
Berlin 1948. In the ruins of
Hitler’s capital, former RAF officers, a woman pilot, and the victim of Russian
brutality form an air ambulance company. But the West is on a collision course
with Stalin’s aggression and Berlin is about to become a flashpoint. World War
Three is only a misstep away. Buy Now
Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians must be supplied by air -- or surrender to Stalin's oppression.
USAF Captain J.B. Baronowsky and RAF Flight
Lieutenant Kit Moran once risked their lives to drop high explosives on Berlin.
They are about to deliver milk, flour and children’s shoes instead. Meanwhile,
two women pilots are flying an air ambulance that carries malnourished and
abandoned children to freedom in the West. Until General Winter deploys on the
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Based on historical events, award-winning and best-selling novelist Helena P. Schrader delivers an insightful, exciting and moving tale about how former enemies became friends in the face of Russian aggression — and how close the Berlin Airlift came to failing.
Winning a war with milk, coal and candy!
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