Summary of Marie Yovanovitch's Lessons from the Edge

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

#1 Travel for me is about anticipation and excitement. It’s an opportunity to see new places, engage with different cultures, and challenge my preconceived notions about how the world works. For my parents and their parents, travel was a survival tactic: a series of stressful journeys to escape the tyranny and oppression of the early twentieth century.

#2 Mama was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, to a Russian father and an Indonesian-born, half Dutch, half German mother. The family was stateless, and they struggled to survive without much money. They shared a house with three other families.

#3 During World War II, the Nazis sent Opa to work in a factory 125 miles away. The family had to leave the church house and move into an apartment in the center of Wiesbaden, seeing Opa only when he came home on weekends.

#4 During the war, Mama struggled to reunite with her family. Papa was deported to a POW camp in Germany, where he formed a choir to sing Russian and Serbian patriotic music. The Nazi guards demanded that they perform for them, but Papa refused until he received extra food.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669382447

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Insights on Marie Yovanovitch's Lessons from the Edge

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 13

Insights from Chapter 14

Insights from Chapter 15

Insights from Chapter 16

Insights from Chapter 17

Insights from Chapter 18

Insights from Chapter 19

Insights from Chapter 20

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Travel for me is about anticipation and excitement. It’s an opportunity to see new places, engage with different cultures, and challenge my preconceived notions about how the world works. For my parents and their parents, travel was a survival tactic: a series of stressful journeys to escape the tyranny and oppression of the early twentieth century.

#2

Mama was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, to a Russian father and an Indonesian-born, half Dutch, half German mother. The family was stateless, and they struggled to survive without much money. They shared a house with three other families.

#3

During World War II, the Nazis sent Opa to work in a factory 125 miles away. The family had to leave the church house and move into an apartment in the center of Wiesbaden, seeing Opa only when he came home on weekends.

#4

During the war, Mama struggled to reunite with her family. Papa was deported to a POW camp in Germany, where he formed a choir to sing Russian and Serbian patriotic music. The Nazi guards demanded that they perform for them, but Papa refused until he received extra food.

#5

After the war, my father and his friends escaped from a concentration camp, and made their way to Paris. They were eventually able to emigrate to England and bring the rest of the family over.

#6

When Mama arrived in Canada in 1957, she was twenty-eight, all alone, and on her way to the New World. She had no strong ties to France, so she decided to try for a better life away from war-torn Europe. She went to Canada, and in 1962, she and Papa moved to Kent, Connecticut.

#7

The Kent School was my parents’ workplace for the next three decades. The boarding school had a coed student body of roughly five hundred. My parents tried to instill in me a lifelong love for Russian culture and tradition.

#8

I grew up with a sense of otherness, as my parents were foreign immigrants in the middle of the Cold War. I was embarrassed by my parents, but I loved them. I developed a lifelong habit of observing before acting, as I didn’t want to make mistakes.

#9

I loved reading, and I lived the books I read. I loved the fictional world where good and evil battled it out and good always prevailed. I loved biographies of famous women, who inspired me to want to do the same.

#10

I loved my time at the Kent School, but I was starting to feel like I wasn’t making much of a mark. I was never very good at sports, and my grades weren’t good enough to get me into the best colleges.

#11

I was all in at Princeton, even though I was an outlier. I was the only woman in my class, and I was still trying to figure out how to fit in. I was not welcome in some classes, and I had to fight to get into others.

#12

I decided to major in history, and get a certificate