ABSTRACT
Vera Lebedeff, whose novel The Heart Returneth is almost a paradigm of theories about the assimilation experience, was herself an immigrant. Lebedeff was born in Kozatin, near Kiev, Russia. When she was about eight years old, she was brought to the United States by Anthony and Olga Sahulko along with their own two children. At first she attended public school in Detroit, but later she was transferred to the Scotch Settlement school in Dearborn, Michigan. She began taking courses in the social sciences at Wayne State University with a goal of undertaking graduate work in sociology. Her novel The Heart Returneth, published in April,1943, was based on her own experiences, those of her stepfather, then a tool and die maker in the Ford plant, and of many other White Russians in Detroit. The problem of Americanization has been a lifelong concern of Vera Lebedeff. Her novel The Heart Returneth portrays an unusual immigrant group, upper-class White Russian emigres in Detroit.
