Imagine a world of too much freedom.
Imagine having too many choices.
Imagine foreign languages flooding the television.
Imagine gangsters being the only ones making good money. Imagine your parents losing all of their life savings in a matter of weeks. Imagine your children enamored with another country and dreaming of leaving. Imagine your nation imploding from being a world leader to a supplicant for aid in a matter of a few short years.
Because of an invitation to witness thelast rocket launch of the 1980s to the Russian space station, I was an eyewitness to this unholy world.
Three Sisters is the true story of what I saw.
To my surprise, I was personally changed by the experience of being part of my friend Olga's world as the Soviet Union collapsed. I came to realize that many of my views about being Jewish, being an American, did not export well to the strange world of Russia circa 1990. Like so many others at the time, I thought that we could transform Russia into a European version of ourselves. I thought total religious freedom to be without question a wonderful opportunity. But I came to understand that these views, and so many others, may not always be correct for Russia.
Knowing Olga and her two friends, who I called Little Irena and Crazy Irena, showed me how strong the 'three sisters' had to be to survive in a world changing every single day.
I took careful notes and wrote the manuscript in the early 1990s. And then, never published the story until now. I worried that my caustic views on Billy, the Florida missionary who sought to build an American mega-church in Moscow, or my coming to understand the emerging Russian patriotism would be unwelcomed. So be it. I lost the manuscript and found it last year. To my surprise, time has shown the stories in "Three Sisters" to be a unique and wonderful window into a Russia few foreigners ever experienced.
Publishing the book after all these years was also the opportunity to show yet another window into Russia, as it perfectly compliments "Selling Peace," which focuses on my experience being the only American in the 1990s to work for the Russian space program.
The memoir of the three sisters and their world is my roadmap to the real story of how the Russia of today was born. It is also the story of my own journey towards understanding how unique is America and how carefully we need to step into other lands. That my own growth took place in a strange city during a strange time only makes the journey, and the telling of that journey, even more rewarding.
