Vladimir Rott considers every day a miracle since his defection 35 years ago from the Soviet Union to Canada.
Vladimir Rott
Rott, 74, fled the Communist country in 1974 with his mother after determining his family had no future under such a harsh regime, especially as Jews.
The Rott family hid its Jewishness from the Soviets by registering themselves as “ethnic Hungarians” to avoid government reprisals.
Though he was a successful engineer, with as good a salary as one could get under the conditions back then, Rott knew he had to defect to the West or risk losing not only his family, but his identity as well.
Last month, Rott, who now lives in Toronto, published part one of a two-part autobiography, titled In Defiance of Fate: Book 1. Joy From Sadness, detailing the travails of his family under Soviet rule.
A large part of the book is informed by Rott’s expansive diary, which he has kept for most of his adult life.
At more than 490 pages, the first volume of Rott’s first-person, family narrative, is compelling, taking the reader from town to town – Rott provides rich details of family stops in Garadna and Miskolc, Hungary and Soviet Bobruysk, Tomsk and Togliatti through the early part of the last century – and peppering the pages with archival photos of both family and landmarks.
The book is a richly detailed voyage of Rott’s life, guiding the reader from his family’s early years in Hungary through to his childhood experiences growing up in German-occupied Bobruysk, in what’s now Belarus. It also highlights his years as a student in Tomsk, as an engineer in Siberia, and his respected work supervising the monumental Lada-Vaz Volga automobile plant in Togliatti.
In a recent interview, Rott told The CJN that the book – which he penned in his native Russian and had translated into Hungarian and most recently English – is his loving tribute to his mother, Regina, and father, Ferenc, as a way of both immortalizing and lionizing them.
It’s Rott’s second time around as an author.
In 2007, Rott published Father’s Letters from Siberian Prison, a collection of handwritten letters that his father wrote while imprisoned in a Siberian gulag under Stalin.
Rott was only three when Ferenc was taken. He never saw his father again.
With this new autobiography, Rott said he wanted the book to provide closure for his life without a father and to honour his mother’s stern-yet-inspiring role in his life.
“Thirty-four years ago I ‘forgot’ to go back to Russia,” he said. “I had to fight to get my family back. The RCMP believed I was a [Soviet] spy. And the Soviets, in allowing me to go to Canada, expected me to spy for them. But I told [the RCMP], ‘I need a future for my children and I [will] need a grave for my mother, because I don’t have one for my father.”
As an act of symbolism, Rott insisted that his Hungarian-based publisher, Széphalom Könyvmuhely, place the images of his parents’ gravestones – he commissioned one for his father in Toronto, who he presumes dies in a gulag and whose grave remains unknown – on the front and back covers of In Defiance of Fate, to further cement their memories on a lasting document.
“I became a writer just because I started writing,” Rott said. “But I had two huge supports [for this book]: my father’s letters and my family. My grandchildren provided the subtitle to this book.”
In his interview, as in his book, Rott describes how he befriended a distant cousin who lived in Toronto and was able to take a trip to Canada with his wife, Iya, in 1973, on the condition that he “spy” for the KGB.
This brief visit overseas opened Rott’s eyes to the “wonder” of the freedom in the West and cemented his resolve to find a way out of the USSR for the sake of his family.
A year later, Rott conceived of a plan to fool his Soviet minders into believing his family was Protestant in order to ostensibly attend a wedding in Toronto.
After much cajoling and political intrigue – which Rott scrupulously retells in the book – the Soviet authorities finally allowed him to take just one family member with him to the wedding.
As he recalls toward the end of the book, Rott had to navigate a multitude of bureaucratic red tape and mistrustful authority figures to get out of the Soviet Union.
Ultimately, it was two boxes of chocolates that finally allowed him to escape. He used them to bribe Aeroflot employees into issuing special tickets allowing him and Regina to board an Air Canada flight to Toronto – both airlines had a tacit agreement that allowed each other’s passengers to use either airline to fly out of Moscow, Rott said – and once in the air with his mother seated beside him, Rott broke down in tears when he heard the flight attendants announce they were out of Soviet airspace.
“We are now flying over Helsinki,” Rott writes. “And that is when my nerves failed me and my eyes filled with tears.”
But the cost of his and Regina’s freedom did not come cheaply. His wife, Iya, and their children, Edwin, Sandor and Ilona, were left behind.
The tale of how they were liberated from the USSR and eventually joined him in Toronto is being left to the second book in Rott’s series, which he is currently writing. It’s tentatively titled In Defiance of Fate, Book 2: Joy of Discoveries. He anticipates its release sometime next year.
For more information, visit www.serenapublishing.googlepages.com