Soul to Soul

Hilliard Golden (ca.1875), of African descent, was a former slave who owned property in post-Civil War Mississippi. He was the father of ten children by two different wives. One of his children, Oliver Golden (1887-1940), became a member of the American Communist Party and fell in love with a young Jewish girl from Poland while they were both in a New York jail after a union demonstration in 1928. Bertha Bialek (1905-?) was the daughter of a Jewish Rabbi, Isaac Bailek, who had emigrated to New York shortly before World War I. Bertha married Oliver Golden in 1931 and that year they and a group of Afro-Americans traveled to the Soviet Union where they took up residence in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He died in 1940, partly from the effects of Stalin's reign of terror. Oliver and Bertha's daughter, Lily (1932- ) was born in Tashkent and eventually moved to Moscow where she met and married Abdullah Khanga, a Marxist revolutionary from Zanzibar. It was not a happy marriage and Abdullah returned to Zanzibar where he became to first vice-president of Tanzania. He was assassinated in 1965, three years after the birth of his and Lily's daughter, Yelena Khanga (1962- ). Yelena was born and raised in Moscow where she eventually went into journalism.