The Star of Kazan - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Two servants, Ellie and Sigrid, were taking a walk when they discover a baby abandoned outside a church. A note with the infant says she is to be taken to a nunnery in Vienna. When Ellie and Sigrid find that the nunnery is in quarantine for typhus, they decide to take the baby home and raise her as their own. They name her Annika after Ellie's mother. Annika grows up as a servant in the house where Ellie and Sigrid work. For Annika, life in Vienna is perfect. She has friends, Pauline and Stefan, and she loves her adopted family (Ellie and Sigrid, and the three professors) very much.

Annika is asked by Loremarie Egghart, a snobby rich girl whom Annika despises, to read to her great-aunt. Annika does so and the two become friends, telling each other about their lives. Loremarie's great aunt was a famous theatre personality who went by the stage name La Rondine. They become so close that the great-aunt leaves Annika her jewels when she dies, unaware that they are real; she dies thinking that the jewels are pastings of the real ones which she thought she had sold.

Annika is happy but sometimes wonders about the missing piece of the puzzle: the mystery of her real mother and why she was abandoned. When a beautiful, rich lady announces she is Annika’s long lost mother, Annika is delighted. Her mother takes her to Spittal, the family's estate in Germany, and she meets her brother Hermann, her uncle Oswald, and her cousin Gudrun, but she doesn’t enjoy it. The mansion is derelict and gloomy, the walls are crumbling, and the paint peeling. She meets a friendly Romany/gypsy boy called Zed who works on the farm and cares for Hermann's horse Rocco.

Annika's mother asks her to sign some important documents without really explaining them, and then goes to Zurich. Annika has actually signed over La Rondine's jewels, including her famous Star of Kazan, but is unaware of what she has done. When her mother comes back, she says a relative died and left them lots of money, but in fact she sold all of Annika's jewels so Hermann can go to the army school that he wants to attend, and Annika can have galoshes, which her mother buys a size too small.

Annika is then sent away to a very harsh boarding school for young ladies called Grossenfluss, but the professors and Ellie and Stefan manage to rescue her after discovering that a pupil died there. (The pupil died by committing suicide but the police were not allowed to investigate and were told that it was an accident.) Annika then discovers that her mother is a liar and a fraud when Annika finds a picture of La Rondine and her lover at the bottom of the trunk which had contained the jewels, revealing that the trunk has been opened. Her mother blames the theft on Zed. Zed flees to Vienna with Rocco, to tell the professors his suspicions about Annika's mother. Annika manages to escape back home to Vienna, to those she loves.