• Age: 14 to 18
• Grade: 9 to 12

Swept up in the Bolshevik revolution, Joseph Stalin’s Communist Party purges and World War II, the Rakitova family faces innumerable obstacles to survival. But young Maya knows only that her father is gone and that she must hide her Jewish identity. With what Maya calls “uncommon courage,” her mother fights to protect her, relying on the tenuous hope that Maya can keep her identity a secret.

Maya Rakitova was born in Smolensk, the Soviet Union, on June 4, 1931. In 1954, she graduated from the Faculty of Radio and Television at the Bonch-Bruevich Leningrad Electro-Technical Institute of Communications. Maya, her husband and their youngest daughter immigrated to Montreal in 1981. There, Maya worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for seventeen years. Maya and her husband live in Montreal.

Maya Rakitova's profile page