Books > Biography > Historical, political & military
|
Buy Now
Young Heroes of the Soviet Union - A Memoir and a Reckoning (Paperback)
Loot Price: R385
Discovery Miles 3 850
You Save: R86
(18%)
|
|
Young Heroes of the Soviet Union - A Memoir and a Reckoning (Paperback)
(1 rating, sign in to rate)
List price R471
Loot Price R385
Discovery Miles 3 850
You Save R86 (18%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
|
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 cycle of estrangement that had endured
for nearly a century. His search takes him across the troubled,
enigmatic land of his birth. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal
grandfather - most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph
Stalin - to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet
totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his
family. He returns to Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to
revisit the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious
anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for, learning that
the boundary between history and biography is often fragile and
indistinct. And he visits his birthplace, Moscow, where his
glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet
ministers' wives, his mother dosed dissidents at a psychiatric
hospital, and his father made a living by selling black-market jazz
and rock records. Finally, Halberstadt explores his own story: that
of a fatherless immigrant who arrived in America, to a housing
project in Queens, New York, as a ten-year-old boy struggling with
identity, feelings of rootlessness and a yearning for home. He
comes to learn that he was merely the latest in a lineage of sons
who grew up alone, separated from their fathers by the tides of
politics and history. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his
family'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
citizens' lives.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.