A sequel to the author's autobiographical trilogy--Shush! Growing up Jewish under Stalin, In the Jaws of the Crocodile, and Farewell, Mama Odessa--this book is part memoir and part cultural study about the challenges of immigration and American acculturation. Written with self-deprecating humour, the author, a former Soviet satirist who was punished for trespassing the boundaries of public criticism, recollects his growing pains as he overcame his indoctrinated upbringing in a totalitarian society to embrace America's defining values.

It is New Year's Eve 1945 in a small Soviet town not long liberated from German occupation. Sashenka, a headstrong and self-centered teenage girl, resents her mother for taking a lover after her father's death in the war, and denounces her to the authorities for the petty theft that keeps them from going hungry. When she meets a Jewish lieutenant who has returned to bury his family, betrayed and murdered by their neighbors during the occupation, both must come to terms with the trauma that surrounds them as their relationship deepens. Redemption is a stark and powerful portrait of humanity caught up in Stalin's police state in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust. In this short novel, written in 1967 but unpublished for many years, Friedrich Gorenstein effortlessly combines the concrete details of daily life in this devastated society with witness testimonies to the mass murder of Jews. He gives a realistic account of postwar Soviet suffering through nuanced psychological portraits of people confronted with harsh choices and a coming-of-age story underscored by the deep involvement of sexuality and violence. Interspersed are flights of philosophical consideration of the relationship between Christians and Jews, love and suffering, justice and forgiveness. A major addition to the canon of literature bearing witness to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Redemption is an important reckoning with anti-Semitism and Stalinist repression from a significant Soviet Jewish voice.

The first bilingual (English/Russian) sampling of authentic Soviet underground jokes--mostly political, but also ethnic, and at times erotic--published in the United States at the height of the Cold War. Illustrated.

It is New Year's Eve 1945 in a small Soviet town not long liberated from German occupation. Sashenka, a headstrong and self-centered teenage girl, resents her mother for taking a lover after her father's death in the war, and denounces her to the authorities for the petty theft that keeps them from going hungry. When she meets a Jewish lieutenant who has returned to bury his family, betrayed and murdered by their neighbors during the occupation, both must come to terms with the trauma that surrounds them as their relationship deepens. Redemption is a stark and powerful portrait of humanity caught up in Stalin's police state in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust. In this short novel, written in 1967 but unpublished for many years, Friedrich Gorenstein effortlessly combines the concrete details of daily life in this devastated society with witness testimonies to the mass murder of Jews. He gives a realistic account of postwar Soviet suffering through nuanced psychological portraits of people confronted with harsh choices and a coming-of-age story underscored by the deep involvement of sexuality and violence. Interspersed are flights of philosophical consideration of the relationship between Christians and Jews, love and suffering, justice and forgiveness. A major addition to the canon of literature bearing witness to the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, Redemption is an important reckoning with anti-Semitism and Stalinist repression from a significant Soviet Jewish voice.

Sailor, painter, doctor, lawyer, polyglot, and writer, Dmitri Bystrolyotov

(1901-75) led a life that might seem far-fetched for a spy novel, yet here

the truth is stranger than fiction. The result of a thirty-five-year journey

that started with a private meeting between the author and Bystrolyotov

in 1973 Moscow and continued through the author's subsequent

research in international archives, Stalin's Romeo Spy: The Remarkable

Rise and Fall of the KGB's Most Daring Operative pieces together a life lived

in the shadows of the twentieth century's biggest events.

One of the "Great Illegals," a team of outstanding Soviet spies operating

in Western countries between the world wars, Bystrolyotov was

the response to Sidney Reilly, the British prototype for James Bond.

A dashing man, his modus operandi was the seduction of women--

among them a French embassy employee, a German countess, the wife

of a British official, and a Gestapo officer--which enabled Stalin to look

into diplomatic pouches of many European countries. Risking his life,

Bystrolyotov also stole military secrets from Nazi Germany and Fascist

Italy. A man of extraordinary physical courage, he twice crossed the

Sahara Desert and the jungles of Congo.

But his success as a spy didn't save him from Stalin's purges, at the

height of which he was arrested and tortured until he falsely confessed

to selling out to the enemy. Sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in

the Gulag, Bystrolyotov risked more severe punishment by documenting

the regime's crimes against humanity in unpublished and suppressed

memoirs that rival those of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The first full-length biography in any language, at once a real-life

spy thriller, a drama of desire, and a prison memoir, Stalin's Romeo Spy

is the true account of a flawed yet extraordinary man.

This anthology is a teaching aid for use in courses on Russian literature and culture of the 19th century for English-speaking students. It includes selected poems by Vassily Zhukovsky, Konstantin Batyushkov, Alexander Pushkin, Evgeny Baratynsky, Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tyutchev, Afanasy Fet, and Nikolai Nekrasov. Each poet is introduced with a short biographical account. All poetical texts are supplied with stress-marks. Rare and difflcult words are translated. Cultural and historical background information is provided in footnotes. Editor and compiler of the book, Professor Emil Draitser, teaches Russian language and literature at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

This anthology is a teaching aid for use in courses on Russian literature and culture of the 20th century for English-speaking students. It includes selected poems by Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esenin, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandestam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Iosif Brodsky. Each poet is introduced with a short biographical account. All poetical texts are supplied with stress-marks. Rare and difflcult words are translated. Cultural and historical background information is provided in footnotes. Editor and compiler of the book, Professor Emil Draitser teaches Russian language and literature at Hunter College of the City University of New York.