Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning

Condition - Very Good
The item shows wear from consistent use, but it remains in good condition and functions properly. Item may arrive with damaged packaging or be repackaged. It may be marked, have identifying markings on it, or have minor cosmetic damage. It may also be missing some parts/accessories or bundled items.

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning

In thisÂ â€œurgent and enthralling reckoning with family and historyâ€ (Andrew Solomon),Â an American writer returns to Russia to face a family history that still haunts him.

Can trauma be inherited? It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a century-old cycle of estrangement.

His search takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal grandfatherâ€”most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalinâ€”to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped three generations of his family. He visits Lithuania, his Jewish motherâ€™s home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. And he returns to his birthplace, Moscow, where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministersâ€™ wives, his mother consoled dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a dangerous living dealing in black-market American records. Along the way, Halberstadt traces the fragile and indistinct boundary between history and biography.

Finally, he explores his own story: that of an immigrant who arrived in America, to a housing project in Queens, New York. A now fatherless ten-year-old boy struggling with identity, rootlessness, and a yearning for home, he became another in a line of sons who grew up separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history.

As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his familyâ€™s formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: Nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizensâ€™ lives.
Country USA
Brand Random House Books for Young Readers
Manufacturer Random House
Binding Hardcover
Color Black
ReleaseDate 2020-03-10
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781400067060

Country	USA
Brand	Random House Books for Young Readers
Manufacturer	Random House
Binding	Hardcover
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	2020-03-10
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781400067060

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning

Customers who purchased this also purchased....