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Lilia Sariecheva, the senior author of My Russian Family is a published Russian writer. She was born near Vladivostok in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Lilia has two Bachelor of Science degrees from Russian Universities. The first was in "Russian Language and Literature" and the second involved training to teach mentally and physically challenged persons. Known in Russia as "Defectology," it includes defects in speech, hearing, and mental processes such as Down's Syndrome and autism plus psychotic and paranoid persons. Lilia has taught for over twenty years.
Lilia's paternal grandparents were peasants and her maternal grandparents were nobility. Her maternal grandfather, a prince, was murdered by the Red Guard. Lilia's father rose through the ranks to become a Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB. Her former husband and their son are both medical surgeons. Lilia immigrated to the USA in 1995 and now holds dual citizenship. The Russian Professional Writers Union recognized her talent as a poet and, as a member of this organization, her first poetry book, Hummingbird, was published in Russia in 2001. All proceeds from the sales of this book go to handicapped Russian children. Over 2,500 copies have been sold. Her most recent poetry book, Mermaid, published in 2005, contains Lilia's poems on love and children.
Her poems were also published in two anthologies along with the works of other noted Russian poets: Orpheus in 2002 and Leaves Rustle and the Poem Sings in 2004. Sales for these last three books range from 300 to 800 copies, with the proceeds going to the Russian Professional Writers Union for redistribution to young struggling writers.
Comments from Russian critics have all been favorable. The following quotations are translated from the Russian: "The poems are memorized automatically and then suddenly flash in the mind like an unexpected light breeze." "Lilia is an original artist of a word; she uses a tenacious and sharp glance." "The sincerity of feelings, elegance of style, and cleanliness of the rhyme fascinates."
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Robert Osland assisted in the translation into English and contributed much of the historical background material. He was raised on beef cattle ranches in Colorado, California and Washington State. Over five years in the Marine Corps included tours with the 3rd Division in Japan, the 1st Division in California and two years as a U.S. Embassy Security Guard in Thailand. His formal training was as a reproductive physiologist in Animal Science. His published research papers are from Oregon State University, the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, the University of California at San Francisco, and California State University at Fresno, where Robert became a tenured professor. Robert also spent a year as an advisor on a farm in North Africa on a government grant to improve Tunisian dairying.
He served as Manager of the Al Safi Dairy Establishment for ten years. The Dairy had 13,000 milking cows yielding over 125 million liters of high quality milk yearly. The privately owned Al Safi is the flagship dairy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Al Safi (the pure) holds the Guinness Book of Records as the World's Largest Dairy.
Robert met Lilia in Russia while on a lecture circuit with the late M.E. Ensminger's International Agricultural Technical Schools, created to improve the world's food supply. Robert was always interested in history and listening to the elders in various countries spin tales inflamed his imagination. Together Lilia and Robert make a perfectly paired writing team. Lilia's creative ability and amazing memory of her family's childhood stories plus Robert's organizing abilities and determination to preserve these stories led to the creation of My Russian Family. Lilia and Robert are painfully aware of the huge gap between Americans' perception of Russia and the reality of Russia.
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