Robert N. Reincke

"Death of a Past Life" is a true story of an elite Russian family’s horrific travails from the burgeoning of the St. Petersburg Bloody Sunday Massacre of 1905 to impoverished immigration to Ellis Island in 1949. Through this time it follows the development of three generations as they manage their way through some of the most atrocious situations that man has created.

The epic begins with Josephine and Leonid’s young family in idealistic Tsarist Russia, alternating between St. Petersburg and their dacha in Finland. During this time, families such as theirs, with German/Russian bloodlines similar to that of the Tsars, enjoyed wealth and exuberance in Russia’s great cities far superior to anything before or since.

As the saga continues, Josephine and Leonid’s daughter, Nina, comes of age and her native Russia experiences the financial foibles and apathetic lethargy in leadership that created the three Revolutions of 1917. For the family, the Revolution brings financial ruin, the assassination of family members, and dissolution of all they’ve held dear. The result is banishment to the once idealized countryside during the nineteen twenties and eventual separation of both the nuclear and extended families.

Nina continues to adapt to the tyrannical changes taking place around her as Bolshevism is uprooted and smothered by Stalin and uncounted millions of her countrymen are murdered. The first half of the book ends with the creation of Nina’s new family in newly renamed Leningrad just prior to the next scourge of World War II.

The second half of the book rushes headlong into the Siege of Leningrad, which starved to death half of this once wondrous city’s inhabitants. The immediate family struggles for survival losing more of its remaining members. And then a miraculous occurrence allows an escape to the Caucuses over the frozen Lake Ladoga.

World War II and its atrocities continue to loom, eventuating in the family’s escape from Russia altogether to the capital of the beastly Nazi regime, Berlin. Once there Nina, her daughter Anna, and her husband Nick, are reunited with and meet Nina’s mother Josephine, living in the last vestiges of the family’s German wealth before it, too, is lost. The brooding, fire-reddened twilight sky is interpreted as the blood of the dying victims of war by the innocence of Ann, Nina’s young daughter.

The young family experiences flight yet again from the old communist dragon that chases them and other dislocated Germans from Russia through Germany. The book’s final chapters visits life with Anna in a shattered and hungry post-war Germany, contrasting her surroundings with her mother’s experiences as a child in the luxury of the Finish summer cottages. Finally a new life reveals itself in the vision of the new world, New York, Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty, and with the revelation of a long-held secret by the book’s inspiration, Anna’s father Nicholas.

Actual photos of this family illuminate the era they lived in as they experience first the grandiosity, and then the horrors created by their country’s leaders and followers. The scenes, settings, and events of this classic, Russian epic are not imaginary. They are real. And the tyranny of the period in which this story took place is neither that long ago nor that far flung from the potential of what we can recreate.

Robert, the author and grandson of the book’s protagonist, Nina, has taken the considerable number of stories he was raised with, added historical background, and filled in the complications of human interactions, emotions, subtleties and dialogue in the form of a biographical novel. Where the events written about occurred before anything recorded by Robert’s grandmother, grandfather, Nick, or mother, Ann, they are recreated from later stories and interpretations of how they might have occurred based upon historical facts.

Finally, there seemed to be something else at work here as well, which can only be ascribed to the metaphysical and seeming inference of details that were later corroborated that could have only come from the beyond -- perhaps as other writers have noted, Robert’s deceased ancestors, in an attempt to be heard, were speaking to him as well.

THE FOLLOWING VIDEO (taken by WWUP News) is the presentation of the book to Nina Katschalin (the book's primary protagonist) on the event of her 100th birthday weekend celebration.