YOUNG HEROES OF THE SOVIET UNION

The award-winning New York author sets off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a century-old cycle of estrangement. Alex Halberstadt's 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 three generations of his family. He visits Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. He returns to his birthplace of Moscow where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' 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 he investigates 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, Alex became another in a line of sons who grew up separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history. His family history is one of fear, suspicion, melancholy and rage, and Alex comes to realise that nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives. How poignant this memoir is in the light of recent events in Ukraine and the displacement of millions of people, this is a luminous memoir of identity, exile, ancestry and reckoning. 289pp, illus.