Alex Halberstadt Young Heroes of the Soviet Union Paperback Book

Engrossing Daniel Beer, GuardianA beautiful book... incisive, radiant Olivia LaingIlluminating, dramatic... majestic writing SpectatorEnthralling... a triumph Andrew SolomonAlex Halberstadt returns to Russia, the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth, where decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family, in this haunting work of memoir and history. In Ukraine, Halberstadt tracks down his paternal grandfather most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin. He revisits Lithuania, his Jewish mothers home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious antiSemitism 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 blackmarket 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 familys 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... | Alex Halberstadt Young Heroes of the Soviet Union Paperback Book