Crossings: A life in Russia & Germany in the first half of the 20th century [Hardcover]

Leo R Saal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1996

It is the memoir of Leo Saal's life beginning in Czarist Russia and continuing in Soviet Russia and Germany during the first half of the 20th century. It describes his childhood as part of the German cultural community of St. Petersburg, imprisonment and years in the Gulag, and the campaigns of World War II, first on the Russian and then on the German side of the conflict.

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About the Author

Leo Saal was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1912 to a Russian-German family whose German branch came to Russia in the 1860's. He attended the St. Petri School there but was denied a university education because of his bourgeois background and learned photography and filmmaking. He was arrested in 1930 and again in 1933 when he was sent to labor camps for several years. After his release, he lived and worked illegally in Moscow with his first family. Unable to follow his main interest in drawing and painting, he worked as a construction supervisor on the Moscow-Volga Canal and as assistant to architect Aleksander Pasternak. Mobilized as a civilian construction worker during World War II, he found himself behind German lines and surrendered. For the rest of the war he worked in German military intelligence in a technical capacity. At the end of the war he made his living as a painter in Germany until his second marriage when he began work with the German-American intelligence community. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1953 where he continued to work in intelligence until his retirement in 1973 when he was able to devote himself to the painting career he had begun earlier. He worked as a painter and printmaker in the Washington, D.C. area until his death in 1996 shortly after publication of "Crossings."

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Chronos Press (1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0931848911
• ISBN-13: 978-0931848919
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,109,500 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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