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Post-War Polish Girl
THIS Is MY AFFAIR—Lola Kinel—Lit-tle, Brown ($3).
Anyone who was growing up in Eastern Europe in 1916 could hardly avoid experiences that in peacetime would seem abnormal. Lola Kinel, a Polish girl whose family lived in Petrograd, had no more than her share of Wartime and post-War cyclones, but to U. S. readers the weather she lived through seems stormy indeed. A cut above the usual adventure-autobiography, This Is My Affair should appeal to those who find true stories as readable as novels and often more entertaining.
Lola Kinel returned from a visit to the U. S. just in time to see the first revolution in Petrograd. It was just like a Russian Easter. "It was grand. All one had to do to feel tremendously exhilarated was to go out on the streets." With the Bolshevik Revolution everything got more serious. Lola was an anti-Bolshevik. She turned down a chance to become one of Trotsky's secretaries, got a job instead on the Russian Daily News, only English daily paper in Petrograd, and the last counter-revolutionary paper to be suppressed. She fell in love with a highly proper young English diplomat, kept offending him because she was. not so proper as he was. History was in the making all around her, but she hardly noticed it, was not a bit impressed. "Personally, I shall never feel quite bamboozled by this aura of historical magnificence, nor whisper to my grandchildren about the great and wonderful things I have witnessed." Partly because she got sick of anti-Bolshevik propaganda, Lola was on the verge of being converted to Bolshevism when she had the chance of escaping to Poland on a forged German passport. She took it. Working as a telephone girl in Warsaw, she overheard the first news of Germany's collapse. In the maelstrom that followed the Armistice, her knowledge of languages—she spoke five—was her life-preserver.
She moved on, to Vienna, to Berlin, where she got a job on a music paper.
When that blew up, she landed a job as secretary to Isadora Duncan. With aging Isadora and her young husband Sergei Essenine, Russian poet, she flitted from hotel to resort for temperamental months. Because Isadora could speak only pidgin Russian and Essenine could speak no English, Lola's principal function was to act as interpreter, often in uncomfortably intimate scenes. When one day Essenine got drunk and insisted on going out for a walk by himself to get away from women, there was a fierce quarrel. Lola was made the scapegoat, lost that job.
Meantime her twin sister had gone to the U. S. and married. Lola followed, drifted west to a ranch. There she met a man she liked; it was mildly mutual, so they married. That job lasted four years, left Lola with a daughter and some alimony. In Hollywood where she now lives, she likes to pass the time of day with her neighbors, with the milkman. Talking with them, hearing their wondering comments on her ups & downs, gave her the good idea of putting it all on paper.