Novel takes readers to a place the author never wanted to revisit

When Julia Levitina escaped the totalitarianism of her Russian hometown, she told herself she would never return.

“As a teenager, I used to go to Moscow's international airport and dream of escape, listening to the departure destinations and thinking that Vienna, New York City or Paris were as close as Mars,” the Sydney-based Jewish author told The Jewish Independent.

Levitina spent 30 years in the USSR before she fled to Australia in 1991, with her young children in tow and just $200 in her pocket.

Since then, Levitina has broken her promise only once – when she took her daughter to Saint Petersburg and Moscow for her sixteenth birthday.

“Going down memory lane... There was a lot of hardship and a struggle to get out. Sometimes it is easier to forget.”

Levitina’s intimate experiences of being “locked behind the Iron Curtain” form the basis of her debut novel, The Girl From Moscow, which is set in Soviet Russia at the height of the Cold War.

The protagonist, 21-year-old aspiring actor Ella Ashkenazi dreams of playing Natasha Rostova in War and Peace at the Moscow Theatre Academy, but when she attracts the glare of the KGB, she is labelled a traitor and soon yearns to escape the oppressive Soviet regime.