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Antonina R. von Arnold, 1896 - 1988
A. R. von Arnold, who often went by the nickname Dora, was born in Siedlce (now in Poland) on 26 February 1896 (O. S.). Her father, Roman Apollonovich, then a retired military officer working in the office of the governor-general, volunteered for service during the Russo-Japanese War, following which he remained in Harbin, where he eventually rose to the rank of chief of police. Her mother, born Ekaterina Khristoforovna von Maidel', a dentist by profession, Following Boris to the United States in 1923, Antonina tried her hand at business college, but eventually had to fall back on office work to support herself, as well as her mother living in Harbin (her father died in 1930). From work at the Young Women's Christian Association, she moved to the International Institute of San Francisco, making a career in social work and receiving an M.A. in the subject from the University of California at Berkeley in 1942. An unhappy marriage to a Polish immigrant named Ignatius McGuire was followed by a happier one to the émigré artist Sergey Scherbakoff. Ultimately, Antonina was able to put together enough savings to bring her mother to San Francisco and buy a number of properties, thus achieving the trappings of material success. She died in San Francisco on 8 December 1988. Detailed processing and preservation microfilming for these materials were made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by matching funds from the Hoover Institution and Museum of Russian Culture. The grant also provides for depositing a microfilm copy in the Hoover Institution Archives. The original materials and copyright to them (with some exceptions) are the property of the Museum of Russian Culture, San Francisco. |
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became the founder and director of the Harbin dental school. Antonina had a sister, Liubov', a promising poet who died of appendicitis in Petrograd early in 1917, and a brother, Boris, who became a psychologist in the United States. 
