Young Heroes of the Soviet Union
A Memoir and a Reckoning
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
NAMED ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS’ TOP BOOKS OF THE YEAR
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Russian-American journalist Halberstadt (Lonely Avenue) travels to Russia to better understand his family's complicated legacy in this illuminating but dense memoir. The author vividly describes his travels to far-flung corners of the former Soviet Union, most evocatively his trip to Vinnytsia, Ukraine, to track down his grandfather Vassily, who tells him how he worked as a bodyguard to Joseph Stalin and recounts standing guard at government banquets as well as witnessing mass rape during the deportation of the ethnic Tatars in 1944. Halberstadt's fishing trip along the Volga River with his estranged father is another emotional highlight, and in detailing the life of his mother a Lithuanian Jew he gives an enlightening primer on the genocide in Lithuania, though the history of his extended family becomes bogged down in detail. In the final chapters, the author shares stories from his childhood as an immigrant in 1980s Queens, showing how he navigated prejudice while becoming at ease with his homosexuality. Halberstadt is at his best when writing about his own youth, and his interviews with family members are affecting. Readers who can stick with this when it gets into the genealogical weeds will find much to appreciate in this insightful and moving narrative.
Customer Reviews
Both sweeping and intimate
A tale of sweeping scope at intimate scale. On film it would be a Netflix saga of war, mass murder and displacement, told through the intensity of Kremlin plots and kitchen-table conflicts and clocks ticking like time bombs while children sleep, sweetened by the romance and joy and yearning that give meaning to everyday life. As a Soviet émigré myself, I recognized much and learned even more about how people entangle and persist through the most dramatic moments of history, sometimes in the most mundane of ways—the swirling leaves that make the wind visible.