American Patriot

AMONG HER STUDENTS, Nadezhda Timofeyevna Koroton was admired for the incandescent passion with which she taught her native Russian language and its formidable literature. She could be no less fervent about her hatred of the Communist system, which she fled after many of her family died in the Stalinist purges. In the closing months of World War II she walked across Eastern Europe with her young daughter, then bootstrapped herself out of a refugee camp to the United States and eventually to Dartmouth.

When she received her American citizenship, Nadezhda Timofeyevna marched into the Selective Service office in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and applied for a draft card. If the Communists dared invade her new country, she explained, she would fight with the army, sail into battle with the navy, fly with the air force. The puzzled official told the matronly applicant that she didn't need a draft card, that only young men were subject to the draft.

"Then," she announced, "I go comfort the boys at the front."

Koroton