Governor Jerry Brown with Elena Lagadinova

The serendipity of it all astonishes me.

On 8 July 2016, the Governor of California, Jerry Brown, and California First Lady, Anne Gust, paid a visit to Dr. Elena Lagadinova, the youngest female partisan fighting against Bulgaria’s Nazi-allied monarchy in WWII and the former president of the Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement. 

What remarkable set of circumstances brought these two heroes of the progressive left together?  

The short answer: a bookstore in San Francisco.

The long answer involves a sitting governor wandering into the City Lights bookstore and finding a copy of The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe.  Sometime later the governor tracks down the author of the book because he is planning a short trip to Bulgaria and would like to meet with the protagonist.  Phone calls are exchanged, itineraries are arranged, cakes are baked, and voila!   The governor of California is having tea in Sofia with an 86-year-old Bulgarian champion of international women’s rights.  

As some dolls in Disneyland like to say: “It's a small world after all.”