Letters to the Golden Goose
Manuscript complete.
Lev Alexander Trofimov was born in 1892 in Russian Turkestan, trained from boyhood for the Imperial Navy, and in 1917 commanded the Baltic submarine Leopard. When the Revolution turned his rank into a danger, he crossed Siberia in winter, sailed from Yokohama, and began again in Ohio as an engineer and inventor. He built Speed Control Corporation and later sold it to Fairchild. What he could not carry with him was his mother, Maria Vasilievna. For more than a decade her letters — she still called him her golden goose — crossed the ocean with news of family, faith, shortages, and a reunion that never came. The book is built from those letters, the naval papers he kept, and the American life he made after the country that formed him disappeared.