NEWS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE               DATE: 9/10/07 CONTACT : LESLIE SCHALER, COMMUNICATION ASST., (413) 545-0162   UMASS AMHERST LIBRARY HOSTS EXHIBIT RECEPTION “MIRACULOUS COINCIDENCES: FROM RUSSIA TO HAMPSHIRE COUNTY WITH LOVE” Amherst, MA – The UMass Amherst Library will host a closing reception for the exhibit "Miraculous Coincidences: From Russia to Hampshire County with Love" in the Du Bois Library Special Collections and University Archives Department on Floor 25 at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, September 21, 2007. The exhibit consists of photos, papers, and books from the collection of Zilma Mayants, author of Miraculous Coincidences, a memoir. The reception is free and open to the public, refreshments will be served by UMass Catering. Mayants, a professor of Comparative Literature, Aesthetics and Fine Arts, who published extensively on Chekhov and Hemingway, survived the World War II invasion of the Soviet Union, the country's oppressive regime, and an assassination attempt. Her husband, Lazar (Larik) Mayants, a physicist and lecturer worked with INEOS, a chemical manufacturing, distribution, sales, and marketing company. They immigrated to the United States in 1980, where Zilma taught at Amherst and Smith Colleges, and her husband became a researcher in the Physics Department at UMass Amherst. Both Zilma and Larik were frequently published in the Amherst Bulletin and Daily Hampshire Gazette, especially on topics of human rights. "Written by an academic and storyteller extraordinaire, Miraculous Coincidences is a memoir, but, readers be warned-it is so much more than a memoir," says Mayants' publisher, Michael Minayev. "It is a love story about a country, a childhood, education, travel, resistance, and survival while finding the love of her life, Larik Mayants, a well known Russian physicist and friend of André Sakharov. Far beyond the usual horrors of life and death in a communist regime, the encroaching loss of freedom and spirit, and the loss of one's children, drives the narrative from the USSR to Amherst. Yet, Mayants' book is neither a work of war literature, nor is it a memoir of the Holocaust. Told with the practiced voice of a teacher used to lecturing, Mayants at once criticizes herself and the regime in which she and her husband lived. The humor she reveals is a testament to her spirit and well as to her remarkable memory." Minayev provides insight into the nature of this type of memoir writing, which gives evidence of the live, true voice of a person. He says, "?only a few try to bequeath the invaluable experiences of their lives to younger generations.  And it must be done.  Our generation and that of our parents are lucky to have witnessed extraordinary advancements of history and astounding progress of technology and science?And we, ourselves, are curious about how we used to live before, back when the only sources of information were a single radio station and a deceitful newspaper ironically named Pravda?Memoirs tell stories of the past, with details that historians, working mainly with statistics, are unable to perceive.  Fates of individuals, like distinctive tiles of mosaics, compose a more exact, truthful picture of lives long past." For more information contact Tonia Sutherland at 577-0857 or tsutherland@library.umass.edu.