A Promise Kept - A Tribute to a Mother's Love

Time is running out for many baby boomers. As their parents pass on, the "sandwich generation" faces a loss of connection to its past. A Promise Kept addresses this problem as it traces the life of Salomea Drozdowska, the author's mother, from her childhood in Eastern Europe, through World War II, to her immigration to Canada, and then her life in North America.

Her journey begins with her childhood hearing loss in the Galician town of Drohobych, before the war. She becomes a silent witness of the Nazi occupation of Poland and then of the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine. Later, she flees war-torn Europe ahead of the invading Red Army, becoming one of the first refugees to immigrate to North America.

Upon her arrival in Canada, she experiences severe hardships that leave her alone, pregnant, penniless, and unable to speak English. She has a son, but shrouds his origins in secrecy. Reuniting with her American sister, they resolve jointly to raise that son. Together, they survive this tumultuous endeavor.

Years later, her son convinces her to visit the Alberta farm where she first came to Canada. There, she breaks her 50-year silence and after that reveals the full story of her past.

In A Promise Kept, the author strives to recall all the details of his Ukrainian mother's vanishing history and pays tribute to her lifelong unconditional love. The book presents the immigrant experience as viewed through the eyes of a Canadian-born, American-raised, first-generation baby boomer recounting the events in his mother's life.The book presents four specific benefits for the reader:1. The reader is taken on a journey with the author to discover his cultural roots and in the process to uncover the secrets hidden from him for fifty years by a family mystery.2. The book provides new insights on the human condition while affirming the power of the human spirit to overcome the most daunting of challenges. 3. The book provides the reader with a few new insights into the important events in the 20th century and reveals that even in the darkest moments of life there are good people who are willing to help. 4. This book reassures sandwich generation, baby-boomer readers that they are not alone, and that if the author managed to cope with an extreme case of the stresses of living in the sandwich generation that stretched over ten years and involved shuttling across the continent, they too can survive the challenges involved.

The author is a U.S. and Canadian immigration attorney with 30 years experience who has helped over 10,000 clients with legal problems. A published author of The Young Professional, a career guide book for young people entering professions like advertising, marketing, nursing, teaching and the like, he also worked as a former United Nations correspondent stationed in New York whose articles were published by newspapers in the Southam newspaper chain in Canada as well as various newspapers in the United States.

This book will be of interest to people studying the immigrant experience since, unlike authors like Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes, Teacher Man) Joseph Berger (Growing Up American After the Holocaust) Janice Kulyk Keefer (Honey and Ashes) and Myrna Kostash (All of Baba's Children), it covers the field from both an American as well as a Canadian perspective. Also, unlike Daniel Mendelsohn (The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million) or Diane Armstrong (Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations) that deal with the terror of the Holocaust, this story provides an insight into both Nazi as well as Soviet terror and presents a view of both from a European as well as a North American perspective, since the author's family members were on both sides of the Atlantic during the relevant events.