Young Heroes of the Soviet Union by Alex Halberstadt

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union by Alex Halberstadt

In this urgent and enthralling reckoning with family and history (Andrew Solomon), an American writer returns to Russia to face a past that still haunts him.

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Alex Halberstadt's quest takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth, where decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. In Ukraine, he tracks down his paternal grandfather--most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin. He revisits Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. And he returns to his birthplace, Moscow, where his grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother consoled dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a dangerous living by selling black-market American records. Halberstadt also explores his own story: that of an immigrant growing up in New York, another in a line of sons separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history.

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is a moving investigation into the fragile boundary between history and biography. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family's formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suffering, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781400067060
ISBN 10	1400067065
Title	Young Heroes of the Soviet Union
Author	Alex Halberstadt
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2020-03-10
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable