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

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
Manufacturer Random House
Binding Hardcover
Color Black
ReleaseDate 2020-03-10
UnitCount 1
Format Illustrated
EANs 9781400067060

Country	USA
Brand	Random House
Manufacturer	Random House
Binding	Hardcover
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	2020-03-10
UnitCount	1
Format	Illustrated
EANs	9781400067060