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We’re excited to announce the launch of “Voices from the Hill” a podcast dedicated to showcasing the incredible talent right here in our literary backyard. As a proud member of this vibrant community, Telegraph Hill Arts & Literature believes our local authors deserve a platform to share not just their published works, but the stories behind them.
If you’re a Bay Area author interested in being on the show, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us at submissions@telhilit.org.
Welcome to Voices From the Hill, celebrating the vibrant literary voices of the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Jennifer Barone, along with Joseph Carboni, owner of Telegraph Hill Books. Each episode, we sit down with a local author to explore their creative process, inspirations, and the unique stories that shape our community. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Tania Romanov, writer and author of San Francisco Pilgrimage, Mother Tongue, 100 Years of Exile. She is also an avid world traveler, and her writing has been featured in travel anthologies such as the best travel writing and the best women's travel writing.
Jennifer Barone:Today, we'll talk about her journey as a writer, traveler, creative rituals, and what inspires her to live and write in the Bay Area. So let's dive in. Tania Romanov, welcome to Voices From The Hill. And are you a Royal Romanov?
Tania Romanov:That's the first question I always get. And I hate to admit it, but I am not. Not only that, I'm not even really a Romanov. So let me just tell you the story.
Jennifer Barone:Yes.
Tania Romanov:My name was, before I became a writer, Tania Amochaev. And I was told if you're going to be a writer and you have a name that is hard to spell, pronounce, or remember, you're in trouble. And my best friend told me it took her two years to finally get my name straight. So I said, well, what if I write as Tania Marinovich? And they said, oh my god, that's much worse.
Tania Romanov:Oh, that was my mother's maiden name. I said, guess Roynich is not gonna work either. No. And then all of a sudden it hit me. My father's mother, my grandmother was a Romanov.
Tania Romanov:Romanova is what we called it in Russian. And I said, what about Romanov? Oh my god. Everybody said, absolutely, that's the name. But Romanov for me, it was a peasant name.
Tania Romanov:They were serfs, s e r f. And they were they worked for for people, you know, to for their lives. And then eventually, they they freed and and continued in Russia and and left it. And so it's it's not only am I not a royal Romanov, I'm only marginally a Romanov. And it's always been a fun story.
Jennifer Barone:Wow. So I have heard about a little bit about your family's history of exile and refugee experience, and that seems to also run through your writing. And that you spent a part of your childhood in a refugee camp in Trieste, Italy. Curiously, and I mentioned this to you earlier, we have the famous Cafe Trieste right here two blocks away from us in North Beach where writers gather. How did that history resurface during your San Francisco pilgrimage in your book, San Francisco pilgrimage?
Tania Romanov:Well, Trieste was a terribly important part of my life. And Cafe Trieste also, my brother and I, we grew up in San Francisco and when we were teenagers, we thought this was a really cool part of town. And we would wander around and of course Cafe Trieste was always on our list. And we would look at each other and say, nobody else here grew up in Trieste. Yeah.
Tania Romanov:And so so we just loved it. So for me, San Francisco and Trieste are tied. And I have become obsessed with Trieste over the last years. I spend at least a month a year there now. Wow.
Tania Romanov:I have friends now that I speak Italian. It's really become very important to me. And San Francisco was such a key part of all that. You know, I remember my childhood. I people say, do you remember the refugee camp?
Tania Romanov:You were only five when you came here or even, you know, less. I said, I remember it in great detail. I think if your life changes that dramatically, you remember it. Plus, people always say, oh, I'm so sorry you grew up in a refugee camp. And I look at them and I say, it was wonderful.
Tania Romanov:And they say, what? I say, yeah. Well, it's true. We shared this little square that didn't have walls that reached the floor or ceiling. You know, we shared twin cots with the whole family.
Tania Romanov:But I was just a little kid. I didn't know there were other ways of life. I didn't know people had kitchens or, you know, that you could eat normal food. To me, it was wonderful. And it was only when I was an adult that is I started appreciating what it must have been like for my father who was in his thirties by then and was a refugee for a second time.
Tania Romanov:So for me, Trieste actually never had any negatives. And when I went back there the first time, refugee camp was still there. Wow. Except most of the East Europeans who were there when I was a kid were gone. And now what we had was what we call gypsies, the Roma.
Tania Romanov:They were living in that refugee camp and it was so interesting to wander around and say, that's who I used to be.
Jennifer Barone:Oh, when did you go back?
Tania Romanov:The first time I went back, I was in college. And I've I'm a nutcase traveler. Pilgrimage is my life and I I worked my way through college. I didn't have money from anyone and so I I saved in addition to having three jobs, I saved enough money so that in my junior year, I could travel for four years.
Jennifer Barone:What was one of the first places once you saved your money after working very hard? Like what was one of the first places that you wanted to go to?
Tania Romanov:Europe. You did. So did
Jennifer Barone:you wind up going to even
Tania Romanov:Well, yes.
Jennifer Barone:On that trip?
Tania Romanov:Yeah. I mean, I went to places in The US. You know, we went to summer vacations were always, you know, lakes in Northern California. Trinity Lake was very important. But to me, I wanted to go back to Europe.
Tania Romanov:I mean, I remember getting off the ship from Genoa to New York Yeah. And taking a Greyhound bus to San Francisco. And I remember that trip and I wanted to go back. So Europe was an obsession and as I said, I went for four months, I spent less than $5 a day.
Jennifer Barone:Did you go to Trieste on your first trip back?
Tania Romanov:I did. You did? What was that like? I did. Well, that was when I discovered that the refugee camp was still there and that was the beginning of when I learned that the refugee camp used to be a concentration camp during the war And that's something I'm now writing about.
Tania Romanov:Mhmm. But that was something I didn't know. The so, you know, if you wanna hear that story, I'll tell it later. Yeah. But, yes, Trieste was very important to me.
Tania Romanov:And so moving to a city, you know, that cared enough about places like Trieste Mhmm. That there was a cafe named after it was really powerful.
Jennifer Barone:The Cafe Trieste here is this gathering place for writers.
Tania Romanov:Right.
Jennifer Barone:And then I think there's maybe a mural also in the back that might be of a scene from the town. I'm not sure. But, yeah, tell me a little bit about when you are at the Cafe Chiesta. What are you doing there? What it what makes it special to you?
Jennifer Barone:I feel like it's like our neighborhood's living room.
Tania Romanov:Right. Right. Well, you know, a number of writers have hang out there all the time or did. We've lost a number of them now. I mean, I'm 76 years old.
Tania Romanov:Let's face it. You know, I grew up there fifty years ago. So it it's changed a lot, and what it is for me has changed a lot. Now I go in. Now I meet with my Croatian friend, Franjo, who hangs out there.
Tania Romanov:You know, it's it's really changed a lot, but I always loved it. And Lawrence Ferlinghetti would hang out there. You know, I would meet all kinds of people and that started me heading towards learning Italian and and really getting completely comfortable in it again. But, yeah, I loved Caffe Trieste.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. And when I first heard you read, I heard you from this book, I heard you read a story about learning Italian with Ferlinghetti, but that's maybe a good segue. Why don't we have you read a passage from this beautiful book, San Francisco Pilgrimage? And first, maybe tell us a little bit about the idea behind this book.
Tania Romanov:Okay. Well, you know, I've been on a pilgrimage all my life. I consider that ship from Genoa, that was a pilgrimage and every trip I take in some way is deep and I started writing as I traveled and that's part of the combination. And so I've traveled all over the world and all of a sudden COVID hits. Yes.
Tania Romanov:And you can't go anywhere anywhere except in San Francisco, you could actually go anywhere you wanted because you could walk. There was nobody anywhere near you. And so that's what started my San Francisco pilgrimage where I walked a different route of the city every day which today is part of some famous trail system. Mhmm. But I just did it randomly and it was all places I grew up in.
Tania Romanov:And so that was really fantastic. And now that I've distracted myself from what you asked, but I'm going to read from this book. And what I did was I wrote a page and I'm sorry, a chapter from every day. And, you know, it's it's my past. I look at the cover now.
Tania Romanov:You know, I see the people I grew up with, the the people that came here from the refugee camp. So I'm gonna read you a piece and then we'll talk about it some more. Wonder.
Jennifer Barone:Thank you.
Tania Romanov:Okay. So this is called North Of The Panhandle, which is where I grew up. When we lived in this neighborhood, my grandmother, Daria or Babusa as I called her, went out alone for only one reason, to visit a convent that held daily services. She stepped out of the house, walked to the corner, and turned toward the Panhandle. She followed Fell Street to her destination, which was a few blocks to the east.
Tania Romanov:She would climb the front stairs of a beautiful large old Victorian and immerse herself in the only peace she could find in this foreign land. Services in the old church Slavonic were performed daily and went on for hours as befitted a monastic life. She knew all the priests and nuns who lived here. My adopted uncle Genya would often join her on these visits, and sometimes I would tag along. The interior was small and dark, and I missed the singing that filled the bigger church on Fillmore.
Tania Romanov:But the walk was nice, and sometimes I talked my grandmother and uncle into extending it through the panhandle and maybe even to the playground. Walking down Fell Street now, I cannot find that convent. It has been years since I last recognized this haven, which has to be between Masonic and the old hospital, a distance of just two blocks. I know it wasn't on the corner, so where can it be? You'd think it'd be easy to recognize a familiar house, but they all blend into a cityscape that grows less personal as time passes.
Tania Romanov:Anyway, I'm gonna skip a little bit and I'm gonna write about the home that I lived in. From that church, I would walk along Hayes Street and see the house that I grew up in. And I started meeting people on the street and one of them joined me as we were walking along. And she decided she would get me into the apartment we lived in which I of course was mortified to think about knocking on the door. Can I help you?
Tania Romanov:The woman asked. My friend lived here many years ago and would really like to see it again. When I was five, over sixty years ago, I interrupted. The woman looked at me in surprise. She wanted to hear all about it and invited us in.
Tania Romanov:She was happy to let me wander around in spite of the fact that her partner was working from home and had locked himself in his study. I can't believe this hardwood floor is still here and gleaming, I said. My father built it with throwaway wood scraps from buildings that were being torn down in the neighborhood in the nineteen fifties. It was a source of pride for all our years there. I walked on that beloved hardwood floor along a dark narrow corridor that once rang with the noise of Russian voices and children squealing.
Tania Romanov:The room seemed smaller than I remembered, but still had the same configuration. I saw the kitchen where so many cups of Turkish coffee were cooked and sipped. The outside fire stairs where I could sneak upstairs to add galleys. I reached the bedroom and was mortified to remember the bed wetter who caused my brother to sleep in the dining room since the living room was occupied by Babousia, my grandmother. It's awful how embarrassing memories don't fade.
Tania Romanov:I can't believe Lorraine got me into this altar to my past. I am so happy I was able to get her a bottle of champagne this morning. I am amazed at how this house ended up in my family and I feel a final bit of grand gratitude. Rummaging through my cousin Helen's mother's documents after we lost my beloved aunt Gallia a few years ago, she unearthed history. Documents that I wouldn't even believe still existed if I didn't have my own copies.
Tania Romanov:Specifically, Helen found her father Schura's income tax returns from 1945 '54 and 1955, as well as a deed of joint tenancy by which Morris P. And his family sold property to my father, mother, aunt, and uncle. It was issued by California Pacific Title Insurance and was effective 03/01/1954. The deed was signed two months after the USS constitution. A large ship with a seasick little Tania on board docked in New York, arriving from Genoa, Italy.
Tania Romanov:With those signatures, these poor homeless refugees acquired a San Francisco home that is today worth $4,000,000. Yes, Two months after arriving in The States, our nearly penniless family owned that home. Really? We owned all four apartments. How could it be?
Tania Romanov:Shure and Gallia had arrived a few months earlier, and he and my father got jobs at Sunbeam Corporation fixing appliances for a dollar 25 an hour. With the city being emptied at that time, no one was buying in this declining neighborhood. So the owners were desperate. Houses that didn't sell just stayed empty, but property taxes still had to be paid and expenses didn't stop. The owners finally dropped the price to $15,000 at a time when rent on an apartment could easily be $50 a month if you could find someone to rent it.
Tania Romanov:Then they financed the entire $3,000 down payment since we had no savings. Interest rates were so low that my family's cost for half the house for a year was less than $700, including financing, taxes, insurance, utilities, and repairs. And, of course, looking at the tax returns, I noticed the expense of $56.42 in the first year for hardwood floor repair.
Jennifer Barone:Wow, such a different world than it is today.
Tania Romanov:I know, $5,000,000 house for nothing. Amazing. To sold to it was when the whites and the no, the white people were moving out of San Francisco and the blacks and the refugees were moving in. And that was us.
Jennifer Barone:Perhaps similar to New York. I'm originally from New York as well.
Tania Romanov:Brooklyn. And
Jennifer Barone:I grew up in an Italian neighborhood, much like North Beach is. I guess that passage makes me come up with a different type of question, which is I feel a sense of journey in what you've just read. But then also, you mentioned this term unearthing, like unearthing, sort of like going back into your past and like a detective and finding like, you know, different facts that are surprising. So, in your journey, in your pilgrimages, talk about to me this kind of spontaneous unearthing that maybe helps you to either see the truth of the past in a new light or understand yourself in a new light.
Tania Romanov:Right. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. You know, all of my books basically come from my travel. My my book, The Mother Tongue came because my brother and I finally decided to explore the Old Yugoslavia.
Tania Romanov:And we went from Montenegro through Serbia into Croatia. And I had gone there a lot, but, you know, when you have family somewhere, you go and visit the family, you don't explore the country. And so it was when Alex and I traveled through it that all of a sudden this was a pilgrimage to where my mother grew up to where my father grew up to exploring the past And I just started writing and writing and writing and it led to this book called Mother Tongue. Mhmm. So to me, and pilgrimage are in infinitely related.
Tania Romanov:Every trip is a pilgrimage into memory, into the past, or into exploring a world that you don't know but you will and meeting people along the way. So that's why one of my books is called Never a Stranger and that's my travel book and I just talk to people everywhere I go and it turns into in effect a pilgrimage by linking up with people and moving through day by day. So, I'm not sure that it's a traditional concept of pilgrimage but it's my concept.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. I was gonna ask you that like pilgrimage is typically associated with going to a distant sacred place and sometimes the act of walking. And some cultures have distinct pilgrimage trails like Japan, which you've written about. But what are the not so obvious elements that make a pilgrimage a true pilgrimage to you?
Tania Romanov:Well, I'll I'll give you one example. So I lost my father while I was trekking in the Himalayas. I mean, it was very tough. And I didn't find out that he was gone until I got finished a three week trek around the mountains. And I was I was in the mountains and when I came home, he was gone.
Tania Romanov:And I had had a very troublesome relationship with my father. And I felt so guilty that I had not made up with him or apologized to him or been caring enough for him and he was gone. And then a few years later, I was trekking through the Himalayas one more time. Now I'm gonna cry because on that track, I met my father and we tracked together and I explained to him everything I felt. I shared with him all the love I felt and he was with me and I will never forget that.
Tania Romanov:And so when you say what's a pilgrimage, I don't know, but how could my father join me on this track? Amazing. And that that that kind of thing has happened to me a lot. I lost my mother while I was trekking through Northern Italy through the Dolomiti. Wow.
Tania Romanov:And it was it was the same experience. She's with me now whenever I go there. So I don't know if that helps explain. Does. And same thing with the San Francisco pilgrimage.
Tania Romanov:The first day of the pilgrimage, I decided I had grown up in a very poor slum neighborhood. So I was gonna walk in the only slum left in San Francisco. It turned out to be a total waste because I had never spent any time there. But when I went back to where I grew up to where my heart was, that is when it What
Jennifer Barone:surprised you most about making these familiar streets of San Francisco sacred? Because you've lived here for so many years, but then during this period during COVID you decided I'm going to pilgrimage around San Francisco, this place that I live in. I mean how did you make it or is it already sacred and you're just unearthing that?
Tania Romanov:Well, I suspect it was always sacred but I don't think I knew it. And it took this experience for me to say, oh my god. Yes. Yes. This neighborhood when I walk by, you know, the houses where I lived or when I walked by the library on Hate Street where as a kid I'm a crazy book reader in addition to being a book writer.
Tania Romanov:To walk by that library was like, oh, this is this is where my heart was. Or when I walked by the grammar school playground and remembered the challenging times of being the only white kid in this grammar school, you know, and getting clobbered and getting tough, it it changed everything. So in many ways, it was like this pilgrimage, COVID brought San Francisco into my heart.
Jennifer Barone:Usually, yeah, when people go on pilgrimage like going to Tibet, they're going somewhere really far off to find the sacred. But in this case, I feel like you're unearthing the sacred right in your own background.
Tania Romanov:Right. And it made me understand that I could find it anywhere.
Jennifer Barone:Anywhere. Yeah. So now, I guess I wanna know now like where's the next place you wanna travel? Mean is you know everywhere is sacred Everywhere.
Tania Romanov:So yeah. So you know, one of the most sacred places for me in the world that I I'm not even sure I know why was in Tibet and in Lhasa, you know. And to me, the the the Potala Palace, the hill, I always believed I had gone there as a youth which was not true but it was always in my heart and in my mind and I just got back from there.
Jennifer Barone:Oh, wow.
Tania Romanov:So long ago? Two weeks ago. Wow.
Jennifer Barone:Are you gonna write about this?
Tania Romanov:Who knows? Maybe. I'm writing a lot less all of a sudden. You know, that's the other thing that has changed is I now am taking some time off and I am just living in those moments and thinking about them. And I find that when people ask me about this trip, that's when it starts congealing and I start understanding, you know, what I saw and what it means.
Tania Romanov:It it was an experience of a lifetime and I'm happy I did it and I'll never go back.
Jennifer Barone:As a writer writing about travel, are you writing while you're traveling or do you like to be present as you just described and then kinda come back and let the memories marinate and then write about them from a different perspective?
Tania Romanov:No. It's a combination. I have to write while I'm traveling. And I write so it's interesting. You know, I started writing some years ago and I used to write by hand in a notebook.
Tania Romanov:I wrote when when I first started writing, I was part of a group that wrote three pages every day on a different subject each week and we all reviewed each other's work. I wrote by hand in a, you know, one of those notebooks with the metal ridges on the side and that worked perfectly. I got up every morning and wrote for ten minutes. And then I started using a keyboard. And and then all of a sudden with the iPhone, you could push a button, talk to the phone and it would write for you.
Tania Romanov:I've told so many people about that because now I can walk down the streets of San Francisco and write about what I'm seeing. This book was written while I was walking.
Jennifer Barone:Wow.
Tania Romanov:Then I go home and think about it, you know, and a lot of times I use exactly what I wrote because that's my heart's here. My heart is here.
Jennifer Barone:I'm sensing an importance around presence and being in the moment and being present for it. Yeah. I wanna go back a little bit to heritage. So in your book and one of the stories you you wrote, how many of us have lost our heritage before we realized how important it was. That line really touched me big time as an Italian American.
Jennifer Barone:I often feel like, for instance, that I don't truly belong in either place, like I'm that hyphen in between places. So depending on the situation, I think that aspect could be liberating or it could create this sense of loss or a deep longing for home or belonging. So I wanted to ask you, you know, how does this experience of rediscovery of your heritage and longing or belonging play out in your work and in your life?
Tania Romanov:Well, to me it's such a gift to to have, for example, had my aunt live long enough to help me when I was starting to do the research for the past. And I say to people, you need to talk to your parents, record it all because you never know what it is about their lives that has made you who you are. And you won't know if you don't talk to them and listen. And so many of us, most of us, just wait and our parents die and they disappear and then we say, oh my god, I didn't ask them this, I didn't ask them that. And it's such a gift and I didn't I didn't.
Tania Romanov:I wish I had but it was, you know, my parents left before I became a writer. Mhmm. And so thank God my aunt lived and she could answer a number of questions. And she was a very observant woman who, you know, was tracking her husband, my uncle, and my father through their lives. Do
Jennifer Barone:you ever fill in the blanks?
Tania Romanov:Oh my god. Nonstop. That's so people say, what are your books? And I say, it's called creative non fiction.
Jennifer Barone:Excellent. I give I feel like that gives you so much freedom
Tania Romanov:to write. Absolutely. Sometimes that's exactly what I remember, but sometimes you have to fill in the gaps. This is about my mother tongue was about my mother and her six sisters. Well, you know what?
Tania Romanov:I was I wasn't there when she was a kid, but I write about her and they have conversations. And, yeah, I met them as adults and and I can speak their language because of her. I can speak Croatian and Serbian.
Jennifer Barone:Did you grow up speaking Croatian and Serbian?
Tania Romanov:Yeah. So I English is actually my fourth language.
Jennifer Barone:Fourth language.
Tania Romanov:Right. Yeah. So I grew up and my so my father was Russian. He and his family fled Russia when he was a baby at the communist revolution. So they fled and they were in the end taken in by Serbia because Serbia was close to the czar of Russia.
Tania Romanov:So he grew up in Belgrade. And my mother was Croatian, but she also then married my father and ended up in Belgrade for complicated reasons. But anyway and my brother and I were both born there, but we left when I was six months old. So this is what people can't figure out. When I speak Russian, I sound like a Russian.
Tania Romanov:When I speak Serbian or Croatian, I sound like a native. And they don't believe that I can speak English without an accent, but you're listening to me. So it was like, I I learned in the refugee camp, I spoke Russian with my father and Serbian or Croatian with my mother. And I never even asked her which language it was. And I ended up knowing both because she has so many cousins in both parts of the country.
Tania Romanov:But this continued when I came to San Francisco. So I went to school and learned English in school. In fact, my name Tania, it's not just not Tania Romanoff. My name wasn't Tania, I was Tatiana. And my first teacher said, Tatiana, that's awful.
Tania Romanov:I said, what do you mean? She said nobody could pronounce that. I said, Tatiana? Well, today it seems normal. But she said, don't you have any other name?
Tania Romanov:I said, well, my mother calls me Tania. Oh, she said that's much better. And so I became Tania. And now that's my official name. When I got married, I didn't change my last name.
Tania Romanov:I kept Amachaev. But when you sign your wedding document, your marriage document, whatever name you write is your official name. And I wrote Tania. So that's that's when my name changed. But so in in America, I spoke English at school.
Tania Romanov:I spoke Russian at home and in the Russian school. I lived in Russia, it was just called San Francisco. And I spoke Serbian or Croatian with my mother. And in the middle of a sentence, if I look from my father to my mother, I would switch languages. Interesting.
Jennifer Barone:In mother tongue, you reflect on language and identity. Often learning another language or learning our family's language, I think opens up sort of like a door or a portal of potential. What role does language play in your writing in your life? And how do you feel like it changes somebody's life to be able to move in all these different languages as you're describing?
Tania Romanov:Right. Well, you know, I hated my parents. Hated them for making me speak their languages. And I hated it that they couldn't speak English very well. When you're a kid and you're in San Francisco and you wanna be American and your parents rattle on with this weird language, you say, what?
Tania Romanov:What's going on? And it was only when I became an adult that I so appreciated the gift that they had given me. Mhmm. So, you know, it it's language is something that has become so important to me. It also turns out that I learned languages very easily.
Tania Romanov:So I moved to France in the early seventies. And oh, and I'll tell you this. This is the other part that's funny. So you hear how I speak English. Right?
Tania Romanov:So the French in those days hated American accents. Well, they still do. Anyway, they were so insulting and they were so nice to me. And I I finally said, why do you treat me so well when I speak French? And they said, what do you mean?
Tania Romanov:I said, well, you don't like American accents. And they said, what does that have to do with you? And I said, well, I'm American. And they said, no, you're not. I I said, yeah.
Tania Romanov:No. I really am. And they said, oh, no. And it turns out that I speak French with a Russian accent. Oh, interesting.
Tania Romanov:Because that's my native language. And they love Russians, so it was okay. So to me, languages have become terribly powerful. Mhmm. And, you know, I travel so much.
Tania Romanov:I just went to Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltics. Wow. And there, you know, they're right next to Russia. And of course, now everybody hates Russia. So I would say to them, oh, do you speak Russian?
Tania Romanov:They'd all say no. But I just keep talking and when they understood that my father left Russia a hundred years ago, I wasn't a Putinist. We became so friendly and it was such a gift to get to know these people and relate to them. So, to me language is a real gift. I wish I spoke a 100.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah, I feel like it creates access to getting to know people, maybe to understanding the local culture, but then also I'm realizing more and more the importance of translation too and how that creates access to whole worlds of the way people see things. Yeah.
Tania Romanov:Right. And our phones are making that so much easier for people. So many of my friends walk around with these apps and they talk and then the thing talks to the people in their language. It's a gift.
Jennifer Barone:It is a gift. It's a gift really to understanding, I think, other people. Your books often braid together the personal and historical. Like, how do you navigate between memory and research? Are you doing research when you go to places, or is it just spontaneous the way your travels are?
Tania Romanov:I'm an obsessive researcher, and especially once I start writing. I have I have piles of books on everything. I probably have 50 books on Trieste and on the winning of the war and because now I'm writing this book about Trieste during World War two, and I'm starting to learn things that are just shocking which I had no idea about including learning that my father was part of the freeing of Trieste. Yeah. You know, but to learn that this city that you grew up in that was once a concentration camp that the Nazis took over at the end of World War two Yes.
Tania Romanov:And then to find out that it was Yugoslavia that freed Trieste. America freed Italy from the South, but the Nazis took it over from the North at the end of the war. And so I'm learning these things and I love it and I read it. I I get outrageously deep into it because I I wanna be able to write creative nonfiction, but I wanted to be in a frame of reference. People who read mother tongue, they don't know Yugoslavia from, you know, a hole in the wall.
Tania Romanov:They don't know Istria and which is where my mother was born. It's like they don't know any of this. And I don't want to go into it so deep that it gets boring, but I wanna help people understand what happened and what it was like for three generations or five hundred years of family to grow up there.
Jennifer Barone:Yeah. I think that brings me to this question, but do you find yourself writing for the Bay Area for instance or are you who are you writing for when you are telling these stories? And then what do you want people to take away from them?
Tania Romanov:You know, what I finally realized is who I'm writing for is people like myself who have left a past behind, but also for my children, my grandchildren, and everybody else's grandchildren. And when I get notes from people about my books, people will write me about mother tongue and they'll say, my family left Croatia, you know, a hundred years ago and I knew nothing about it. And reading your book just helped me connect to it. To me, that's one of the biggest gifts I
Jennifer Barone:can That's a huge gift Right. Really to bring that forward for I mean
Tania Romanov:So that's what I write for. It's interesting. It's not for promoting and making money although they are selling quite well.
Jennifer Barone:For your own personal life Right. In your work, like what has writing these stories and going on these pilgrimages because you've been on you're a world traveler. Right. You've gone everywhere. So you've gone back into places that are personally important to you, but then often are also going to other cultures that are, you know, worldwide.
Jennifer Barone:All of these experiences, like, what? Give me some, like, surprising nugget of wisdom that's elevated, you know, your idea of being a human here on this planet, doing this work, importance to your life.
Tania Romanov:Oh, that's a hard question.
Jennifer Barone:It is. I mean, I struggle with that one in
Tania Romanov:my Well, own I'll tell you, there's something coming up in a few weeks and thinking about it helps me deal with what's happening. I am going to be trekking in the Himalayas again and I'm 76 years old. And one of the things I was supposed to do on my way here was walk up the Hyde Street Hill which is 300 feet of elevation elevation gain, gain, you know, steep steep steep because I need to get in shape for this trek and I have to be in shape for it. It's very important. But in the end, it's not about that.
Tania Romanov:It's about being in a country I I love India. I go there all the time. I've gotten to know it every year. I'm gonna be in the far Northeast corner of India between Bhutan and Nepal. I'm gonna be up near a mountain that's 28,000 feet high.
Tania Romanov:And you can picture me just talking about this. This is like a pilgrimage and it's a pilgrimage into a life that I have gotten to know and a gift. I mean, think about how old I am and yet here I am going on this track. It's like life is here to be lived and that's the gift that all these pilgrimages give me.
Jennifer Barone:This is such a great note to end this conversation. It's so perfect. Thank you so much for sharing your work, Tania Romanov. This has been just a pleasure to get to know you and to hear about your process and your perspective. Thank you so much.
Tania Romanov:Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. It was wonderful to talk to you about it. Thank you.
Jennifer Barone:For listeners who would like to learn more about Tania Romanov and her work, you can visit TaniaRomanov.com. Also, go to her Instagram page and come and buy all of her books at Telegraph Hill Books. Yes, please do. Support your local bookstores and your local artists. Thank you so much, Tom.
Tania Romanov:Thank you. I really appreciate this.
Jennifer Barone:What a pleasure.
Tania Romanov:You reached my
Jennifer Barone:heart. You too. This podcast is brought to you by Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature. If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow, subscribe, and leave us a review. Visit tellhighlit.org to find out about our local events such as author talks, writing workshops, and more.
Jennifer Barone:Consider making a donation to support our public programs. If you are a Bay Area author interested in being on the show, we'd love to hear from you. Reach out to us at submissions@telhighlit.org. Thanks again for tuning in. I'm Jennifer Barone along with Joseph Carboni at Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature.
Jennifer Barone:And this has been Voices from the Hill. Until next time, keep reading, keep writing, stay inspired, and come visit us at Telegraph Hill Books in North Beach, San Francisco.