Traveler,teacher, gardener, cook, publisher and now novelist (novella-ist?) Barbara Baer of Forestville in west Sonoma County finds beauty, even comedy, in the darkest oppressive days of the late Soviet Union.
Grisha the Scrivener, based on a man she knew during her time of teaching there in Tashkent and Georgia, carries the tale of “our miserable Russian century” in this heart-breaking and laugh-making tale. An exiled Georgian journalist, he seems to embody the spirit of the samizdat, the underground self-published literature and news which brave dissidents passed on by hand. They were the Internet of that brutally controlled society.
Ghost Road Press of Denver published it.
Grisha, Gregory Gregorovich Samidze, hangs on to hope through imprisonment, TB, through 26 years by clinging to a fragile private life which can't be touched by the government – occasional decent food, love, family and friends. His life is a reminder of the German song Die Gedanken sind Frei, thoughts are free. (English versions by Pete Seeger, Leonard Cohen and others are on YouTube,)
Baer told Sara Peyton of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “In life the real Grisha, whose name was Guivi, was such a trickster, such a bundle of contradictions, such an odd man and such a dishonest man, that he became my muse. He's not real-to-life anymore than any character is, but when he died I just couldn't let him die in my imagination. I read and reread the last letters he wrote to me in desperation during the civil war but I couldn't do anything to help him and that always stayed with me. So I gave him a longer life.”
Baer appropriately introduced Grisha the Scrivener at the September 2009 Sonoma County Book Festival, of which she has been a major supporter.
A graduate of Stanford University in English Lit, she has long been passionate about pomegranates; her Floreant Press in 2006 published Pomegranate Roads: A Soviet Botanist's Exile from Eden, by Dr. Gregory Levin, a botanist who trekked across Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasus in search of rare, endangered and mysterious wild pomegranates for more than 40 years,. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, he was exiled from his own hidden Eden and his collection of 1,117 pomegranates.
Floreant, at http://www.floreantpress.com/index.htm also has published memoirs and collections of memorable writing by California women.
A tireless traveler, Baer also has taught in India and recently celebrated a milestone birthday in Paris.
Ghost Road Press of Denver published it.
Grisha, Gregory Gregorovich Samidze, hangs on to hope through imprisonment, TB, through 26 years by clinging to a fragile private life which can't be touched by the government – occasional decent food, love, family and friends. His life is a reminder of the German song Die Gedanken sind Frei, thoughts are free. (English versions by Pete Seeger, Leonard Cohen and others are on YouTube,)
Baer told Sara Peyton of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat: “In life the real Grisha, whose name was Guivi, was such a trickster, such a bundle of contradictions, such an odd man and such a dishonest man, that he became my muse. He's not real-to-life anymore than any character is, but when he died I just couldn't let him die in my imagination. I read and reread the last letters he wrote to me in desperation during the civil war but I couldn't do anything to help him and that always stayed with me. So I gave him a longer life.”
Baer appropriately introduced Grisha the Scrivener at the September 2009 Sonoma County Book Festival, of which she has been a major supporter.
A graduate of Stanford University in English Lit, she has long been passionate about pomegranates; her Floreant Press in 2006 published Pomegranate Roads: A Soviet Botanist's Exile from Eden, by Dr. Gregory Levin, a botanist who trekked across Central Asia and the Trans-Caucasus in search of rare, endangered and mysterious wild pomegranates for more than 40 years,. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, he was exiled from his own hidden Eden and his collection of 1,117 pomegranates.
Floreant, at http://www.floreantpress.com/index.htm also has published memoirs and collections of memorable writing by California women.
A tireless traveler, Baer also has taught in India and recently celebrated a milestone birthday in Paris.
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