The Heart Returneth
By LIPPINCOTT
IN The Heart Returneth Vera Lebedelf tells the very human story of the small and close-knit. While Russian colony in Detroit. There in the heart of a big, industrialized American city, a few uprooted individuals are living on their memories, trying vainly to preserve for themselves and their children something of the glamour of old Russia. They are gentle, appealing people—Prince Lucian who works days in a factory and studies engineering at night school and who in the end finds an acceptable way to serve the Russia he loves; André Borodin, the successful lawyer who so clings to his Russian past that he can find no peace in America; Anna, who uses her memories of the old life to create beautiful gowns for her American patrons; and the Countess Xenya Valdai, tense and deeply unhappy in her exile. The book is filled with a hopeless nostalgia — a sense of futility. To read it is to extend one’s sympathies, to feel greater understanding for those who have been rudely transplanted and must create their homes in a strange land.