Here is the short summarization of my most important book: Memoirs of a Soviet Girl Chapter One: The Weight of Snow I was born on January 3, 1971, in the Soviet Union, when winter lay thick across the land and the cold seemed to seep into your very bones. My first breath was drawn in a country that would not survive to see my thirtieth birthday, though I did not know this then. None of us did. The Soviet Union was all I knew—the gray apartment blocks, the lines for bread, the whispered conversations that stopped when a child entered the room. It was a life of small spaces and careful words, where even at nine years old, I understood that some things were not to be spoken aloud. In 1980, my family made a decision that would alter the course of my life. We fled to Ukraine. I was just a child, clutching what few belongings I could carry, not understanding fully what it meant to leave behind everything familiar. I thought perhaps we were seeking something better. I did not know we were simply trading one nightmare for another. Chapter Two: The Scars Ukraine Left Behind Ukraine was supposed to be our refuge. Instead, it became the place where I learned that cruelty wears many faces. The harassment began almost immediately. As a Russian girl in a place where old hatreds ran deep, I was marked as different, as unwelcome. The taunts came first—words hurled like stones across the schoolyard. Then came worse things. Things I still struggle to speak about, even now, decades later. There were neo-Nazis among the boys who tormented us, who wore their hatred like badges of honor. They made it clear that people like me—Russians, outsiders—did not belong. One night, their threats nearly became something far darker. I was almost raped. Almost. That word carries so much weight, doesn't it? As if because the worst did not happen, I should simply be grateful and move on. But "almost" leaves its own scars, invisible but no less real. I learned then what it meant to feel unsafe in my own skin, to walk through each day with my shoulders hunched and my eyes down, trying to make myself smaller, less noticeable. Trying to disappear. Chapter Three: The American Dream America arrived in my life like a fairy tale when I was in my twenties. The land of opportunity, they called it. The place where anyone could reinvent themselves, could build a new life from nothing. I believed in that dream with the fierce desperation of someone who had known only hardship. In 1995, I became a United States citizen. I stood in that courthouse and swore my oath, my hand trembling with pride and relief. I was American now. Safe at last. Or so I thought. Chapter Four: Ygor I met Ygor in eleventh grade, back in the Soviet Union, when we were both young and the world seemed full of possibility despite everything. He was my first love, my only love for so long. We built a life together—four children, years of shared history, the accumulated weight of a lifetime together. I thought we would grow old side by side. But somewhere along the way, in the safety of America, in the comfort of the life we had built, Ygor found other women. Not one. Many. The betrayal came in waves, each revelation another small death. After four adult children, after decades together, after surviving everything we had survived, he threw it all away. The divorce was a formality that felt like an execution. Ygor had connections, standing in the community, respect I had never managed to accumulate in the same way. The court proceedings were swift and brutal. He won. He kept everything—the house, the life we had built, the security I thought we shared. And I was cast out. Chapter Five: The Rooming House The rooming house smells of mildew and desperation. The walls are thin enough that I can hear my neighbors' most intimate moments, their arguments, their struggles that mirror my own. Every night, I check the locks three times. Every morning, I wake with my heart racing, unsure what new threat might await me in the hallway. This is not how I imagined my fifties would look. This is not the ending I wrote for myself. I was a nurse for twenty years. Twenty years of caring for others, of holding dying hands and wiping fevered brows, of memorizing medications and procedures and the thousand small kindnesses that make the difference between merely surviving and truly healing. I was good at my work. I was needed. But I left nursing to write. I had stories that needed telling—two books worth of stories. "American Cryptids" came first, my exploration of the unconfirmed beasts that roam our wooded places, those creatures that exist in the spaces between belief and skepticism. Perhaps I felt a kinship with them, these beings that no one quite believes in. And this book, "Memoirs of a Soviet Girl," where I tell my truth. All of it. The good and the terrible, the survival and the cost of surviving. Chapter Six: The Golden Arches Now I work at McDonald's. Let that sink in for a moment. A woman of fifty-four, with nursing credentials and two decades of medical experience, with two published books to her name, flipping burgers and working the register for minimum wage. I am overqualified to the point of absurdity, but beggars cannot be choosers, and I am, in every way that matters, a beggar now. This week, they cut my hours. Another computer kiosk has been installed, gleaming and efficient, requiring no breaks, no benefits, no living wage. The machine does not need to eat or pay rent in a rooming house where safety is never guaranteed. The machine does not wake at night wondering if this month will be the month it finally becomes homeless. I take orders from people half my age. I smile at customers who sometimes look through me as if I am invisible, just another interchangeable part of the fast food machinery. I clean bathrooms and mop floors and try not to think about the patients I used to care for, the lives I helped save, the person I used to be. Chapter Seven: Survival Some days, I do not know if I will survive. Not metaphorically—I mean literally. Will there be enough money for rent? For food? For the medication I need but can rarely afford? Each day is a calculation, a careful rationing of resources that never seem to stretch far enough. I am exhausted in ways I never imagined possible. Not just physically, though my body aches from standing on my feet for hours, from the constant motion of service work. But exhausted in my soul, in that deep place where hope lives or used to live. I think sometimes about that 17-year-old girl fleeing the Soviet Union, full of fear but also possibility. What would I tell her if I could? Would I warn her about what was coming? About Ukraine and Ygor and the rooming house and McDonald's? Or would I simply hold her and tell her that she would survive all of it, that survival itself is a kind of victory, even when it doesn't feel like one? I escaped the Soviet Union. I survived the neo-Nazis in Ukraine. I rebuilt a life in America, became a citizen, raised four children, spent twenty years healing others, wrote two books. I have survived poverty and betrayal and the slow erosion of everything I thought was secure. I am still here. Some days, that is enough. Some days, it has to be. Epilogue: The Stories We Tell This is my story, but it is also the story of countless others who have learned that the American Dream is not guaranteed, that safety is an illusion, that everything you build can be taken away. We are the invisible ones, the ones who fell through the cracks, who work at McDonald's and live in rooming houses and lie awake at night wondering how we got here. But we are also survivors. And our stories matter, even when the world would prefer not to hear them. I was born in the Soviet Union on January 3, 1971. I have lived through more than most people can imagine. And I am still here, still standing, still telling my story. That, in the end, is what they can never take from me. The truth. My truth. This life, with all its scars and sorrows and small, stubborn moments of grace. Thank You For Reading This. If you care to donate to help me finish, publish, and release my books, I thought I should create a brief summary of my most important writing, "Memoirs of a Soviet Girl" If you care to help me finish these books, and to survive the now wicked life that has been dealt to me, the link is included below. buymeacoffee.com/yelisaveta I love you all. Now and always.