"Anastasia"

By jumping off a bridge at Berlin in 1920 an obscure young woman started ripples of cause and effect which expanded in grandeur until, last week, she stepped off the Bejengaria, at Manhattan, as Her Imperial Highness, Anastasia, fourth and youngest daughter of the last Tsar of all the Russias.

Those who fished the young woman out of Berlin waters found her in delirium and unable to tell her own name. Taken to a sanitarium, she encountered one Fraulein Peutert who soon made the striking announcement that the new patient was the Grand Duchess Tatiana, second daughter of Nicholas the Last. When the Baroness de Buxhaven, onetime Maid of Honor at the Court of Nicholas II, visited the young woman in Berlin and positively declared that she was not Tatiana, it was later announced that she is Anastasia.

The young woman soon proceeded to relate how she had been left for dead when the Royal Family were executed at Ekaterinburg in East Russia, July 16, 1918; how a young Bolshevik had rescued and carried her off to Bucharest, Rumania; and how she had there given birth to a son.

Shortly it was announced that the young woman had "flat feet." So.had the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Gradually a number of miscellaneous retainers of the Tsaral family visited the young woman, some affirming and others denying that she is Anastasia.

Finally there arrived in Berlin from Copenhagen the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, sister of Nicholas II. Having visited the young woman, the Grand Duchess Olga formed an opinion which she still holds and was at pains to cable to Manhattan last week. It is summed up by the ejaculation, "Impostor!" At Copenhagen this view is known to be held by the 80-year-old Dowager Tsarina Maria Feodorovna (TIME, March 28, 1927), consort of the late Tsar Alexander III, mother of Nicholas II.

From such high opinion it is difficult to differ. Last week the young woman quietly rested on her claims and did not challenge a widespread assertion that her expenses in the U. S. will be defrayed by rich Mrs. William B. Leeds, the onetime Princess Xenia of Russia, now sojourning in the fashionable West Indies. Finally, observers recalled that Berlin police detectives long ago satisfied themselves that the young woman is Franziska Schanzkowski, a Polish peasant, born on the sixteenth of December 1896, at Borowielass in Pomerania.