Young Heroes of the Soviet Union - Alex Halberstadt Kartoniert (TB)

'Engrossing' Daniel Beer Guardian'A beautiful book... incisive radiant' Olivia Laing'Illuminating dramatic... majestic writing' Spectator'Enthralling... a triumph' Andrew SolomonAlex Halberstadt returns to Russia the troubled enigmatic land of his birth where decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family in this haunting work of memoir and history.In Ukraine Halberstadt 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 Holoc aust 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.