The West in Her Eyes
Summer 1918, and the European war continues to be an inconvenience to twenty-year-old Esther. Daughter of an oil-rich family, she has waited three years at home in Baku on Russia’s Caspian coast to travel to St Petersburg, two thousand miles away, and take up her place as a pianist at the Conservatoire. With Bolsheviks in control of Baku and Turks infiltrating the oilfields, Esther and her family seek temporary respite in Persia. As civil war and rumours of the tsar’s murder make return home increasingly unlikely, two encounters in Teheran determine the course of her life and that of her family.
Summer 1918, and the European war continues to be an inconvenience to twenty-year-old Esther. Daughter of an oil-rich family, she has waited three years at home in Baku on Russia’s Caspian coast to travel to St Petersburg, two thousand miles away, and take up her place as a pianist at the Conservatoire. With Bolsheviks in control of Baku and Turks infiltrating the oilfields, Esther and her family seek temporary respite in Persia. As civil war and rumours of the tsar’s murder make return home increasingly unlikely, two encounters in Teheran determine the course of her life and that of her family.
Summer 1918, and the European war continues to be an inconvenience to twenty-year-old Esther. Daughter of an oil-rich family, she has waited three years at home in Baku on Russia’s Caspian coast to travel to St Petersburg, two thousand miles away, and take up her place as a pianist at the Conservatoire. With Bolsheviks in control of Baku and Turks infiltrating the oilfields, Esther and her family seek temporary respite in Persia. As civil war and rumours of the tsar’s murder make return home increasingly unlikely, two encounters in Teheran determine the course of her life and that of her family.