Jews, Soviet -- United States -- Biography. |
Jews -- Soviet Union -- Biography. |
Halberstadt, Alex -- Travel -- Russia (Federation) |
Halberstadt, Alex -- Childhood and youth. |
Halberstadt, Alex Leo |
Soviet Jews |
Available:
Library | Shelf Number | Shelf Location | Status |
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Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library | 305.8924 HALBERSTADT | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... New Bedford Free Public Library | B HALBERSTADT 2020 | BIOGRAPHY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Plainville Public Library | 92 HAL | NONFICTION | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
"You came here as my grandson, not my interrogator," Alex Halberstadt's grandfather Vassily remarks to him when the writer visits him in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia in the early 2000s. A Soviet-Jewish emigrant who grew up in New York, Halberstadt presses his grandfather, a former major in the secret police who was Stalin's last surviving bodyguard, to divulge his crimes. In their conversations, the 93-year-old offers hints of the horrors he both witnessed and inflicted, but no fulsome confession. Sentences trail off, watery eyes stare into the middle distance; Vassily remains impenetrable. He "shrouded himself in the softening ravages of age, the creases and lines that erased from his face the look of mastery and even cruelty" discernible in photos of his younger self. Halberstadt seeks to decode Vassily's "roles as perpetrator and victim", but he is forced to concede a defeat of sorts: "I realised how naive I'd been. His culpability was an immense, unknowable continent filled with indecipherable ambiguities. Vassily had merely permitted me into the vestibule of his past." Vassily is the enigma at the heart of Halberstadt's odyssey through his traumatic family history in the now extinct world of the USSR. An act of literary archaeology, Young Heroes of the Soviet Union digs through Halberstadt's childhood memories, surviving photographs and the reminiscences of his parents and grandparents to unearth the dark bedrock of Soviet history. Its finely wrought prose ranges from Moscow in the 1930s to Vilnius in the 50s and New York in the 80s, melding the genres of biography, history and memoir. The book is more than just an account of one family's ordeals: it is an engrossing account of dictatorship, war and genocide, and how the toxic legacy they left behind has etched itself into successive generations of Soviet citizens. Consumed by Halberstadt's own longing for meaning, it meditates on the power of storytelling to bind our unstable and episodic memories into a coherent narrative - and on the gaps and enigmas that make this impossible. Halberstadt is both interrogator and grandson: an "amateur mapmaker" of the lives of his relatives and a determined protagonist who seeks to make their fragmented relationships whole again. Halberstadt stands at the confluence of not one but two family tragedies. Vassily's blood-drenched work in the security police drew him away from his wife and child and made him remote and inaccessible, the source of "an affliction that spread from parent to child ¿ husband to wife". Ashamed of "carrying the genes of a KGB officer and legally sanctioned killer", Halberstadt's father, Viacheslav, sought refuge in an underground world of American films, records, books and fashion. He proved an unfaithful and irresponsible husband, and an absent and neglectful father. For Halberstadt, Vassily is the source of his father's moral failings, and a cipher for the "father" who looms over the entire history of the Soviet Union: "Fifty years after his death, Stalin - the scarecrow of black-and-white newsreels - had reached into my life, too." On his mother, Anna's, side, Halberstadt's family were Lithuanian Jews who endured the torments of first Soviet, then Nazi, and then again Soviet occupation. Only 5% of Lithuania's Jews survived the Holocaust, making Halberstadt's own grandparents, Raisa and Semyon, "statistical marvels". Antisemitism lingered in postwar Lithuania, bolstered by the discriminatory policies of the Soviet state. Promotions were blocked; hateful phrases were muttered in the street; accusations of blood libel still rang out; outside Vilnius, families would gather to enjoy picnics on the mass graves of Jews slaughtered by the Wehrmacht. Even as a schoolgirl, Anna "began to sense the weight and darkness of the place and time in which she lived" and years later, when the Soviet government finally agreed under international pressure to issue exit visas to the USSR's Jews, she resolved to emigrate. When he boarded a flight to Vienna with his mother in 1979, Halberstadt left behind both his native land and his father, who remained in Moscow. Psychoanalytic notions of trauma frame Halberstadt's excavations. As a teenager in New York, he "drank in Americanness" like water from a tap, eager to reinvent himself in a new language and culture. He practised speaking English in front of a mirror, immersed himself in the labyrinthine rules of baseball and protested when his mother listened to "depressing" recordings of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova reading her verse. Unaware that "repression perpetuates trauma", he didn't understand that "the nightmares that visited me several times a week might have had something to do with my radical makeover into someone seamlessly, if blandly, American". Young Heroes of the Soviet Union appears, then, as an attempt to heal the rifts that opened up in Halberstadt's sense of himself, to reclaim and reorder a past he had tried to forget. It is not, however, a triumphant tale of self-discovery and self-healing. Again and again, Halberstadt's relatives refuse to yield to his need for confession, reconciliation and redemption. His father tells him that "there is no more to be gained from sifting through the past than through cigarette ashes". On a two-week fishing expedition in southern Russia, father and son find "a way of being together that worked best" when, engrossed in their lures and baiting hooks, they dispense with words entirely. Only in silence can they begin to enjoy their "primordial, biological bond". Halberstadt eventually acknowledges that his father "wouldn't, or couldn't, give me the answers I'd come for". He consoles himself, though, with the thought: "I didn't need him to finish all the sentences he'd left incomplete. I could decide for myself." Deciding for himself involves not ventriloquising for his father but retreating into east European history in a bid to explain his family's traumatic past and disjointed relations in the present. History is "not the ordered narrative of books", Halberstadt writes, but in the end he opts for the most ordered narrative of all. This is the monocausal lament of liberal Russians across the centuries that attributes "the despotism of the country's rulers and the people's acquiescence in it" to the "nation's formative trauma" at the hands of the Mongols. The Mongol invasion in the 13th century unleashed "an unstoppable chain reaction - an intergenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, grief, melancholy and rage that, over time, curdled into new historical calamities, new traumas to pass on to the young". Relationships in Halberstadt's own life that appeared to hinge on private resentments and misunderstandings in fact turned on monumental forces over which individuals had no control. A cyclical history of tyranny and injustice thus binds families in the 20th century with their 13th-century forebears. This history also allows Halberstadt to rescue from despair his own relations with his father and Vassily. Like Halberstadt, they too experience recurrent nightmares and cry out in their sleep. This shared genealogy of trauma binds Halberstadt's stubbornly incomplete family narrative into another, national story, one which dispenses with ambiguity to follow the clean lines of historical interpretation. The past becomes an alibi for the present as Halberstadt seeks to reconcile his twin roles of grandson and interrogator: the need to find love and the need to find meaning.
Library Journal Review
In the ultimate act of self-retrospection, Halberstadt (Lonely Avenue) investigates his identity by traveling to Russia, his country of birth, to interview family and document the horrifying effects of the world wars. When the author learns that his grandfather is alive, but ostracized because of "unmentionable things" committed as a personal bodyguard of Joseph Stalin, Haberstadt develops a project to uncover secret histories and their reverberation through the generations. Traveling through Russia and Lithuania, Halberstadt visits his father, grandparents, and other distant relatives. The history of Jewish relatives in Lithuania suffering waves of pogroms is contrasted against his paternal grandfather's conscription into the Soviet army and service for Stalin. Such a personal history stands apart from other titles because, although the journey is framed as a family narrative, historically detailed episodes are impressively illuminated. Particularly commendable is the archival research on Vilnius, Lithuania's capital. VERDICT An impeccably executed and unique genealogy that encourages us to examine the history that informs us of who we are.--Jessica Bushore, Xenia, OH
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 The Bodyguard The plane pitched to the left and began to descend. A diorama flashed into view through a break in the cloud cover: low cabins standing in puddles of pea-green grass, a pond and a sluiceway and some obsolete factory buildings dreaming in pastureland. Then fog rolled in from somewhere below. Sheremetyevo airport, a linoleum labyrinth lit dimly by fluorescents, was watched over by soldiers barely out of their teens who leaned languidly against the walls, assault rifles slung over their shoulders. I waited beside a church group from Michigan, half a dozen families in pristine white sneakers who joked heartily with one another, as though they were waiting out a lull at the Department of Motor Vehicles back home. Just then, their American sense of inviolability reassured me. My case of nerves, I knew, was shared by many Soviet immigrants returning to the motherland: the worry that the gates won't open again when it's time to leave. The customs inspectors' opaque, somehow familiar faces--faces professionally immune to interpretation--told me that liberties I hadn't questioned the previous morning were now granted and revoked at the whim of these men, and men in other, different uniforms. In my Levi's and windbreaker, I blended in with the church group, but I was a returning refugee, a category of traveler the customs men regarded with suspicion and possibly envy. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and strained to pick up scraps of conversation. When my turn came, I stepped up to the window and slid my passport under the glass. The inspector, fiftyish with a combover, didn't look up. When his eyes moved across the column of text that read, "Place of Birth: Russia," the corners of his mouth widened into a foreshadowing of a grin. He stamped the passport, slid it back and, looking up at last, said, "Welcome home, Mr. Halberstadt." Later that afternoon, my father and I sat in his kitchen, smoking. I'd quit cigarettes in college, but I pulled on one of his Winstons, watching the smoke drift to the ceiling, where it was forming a storm cloud. My father had been smoking since he was sixteen. He was remarried and had a college-age daughter and had never recovered completely from the heart attack he'd suffered nearly fifteen years earlier. "Why don't you quit smoking?" I prodded. He said he would quit "when things get easier" and that he was "crazy about cigarettes." We both knew things wouldn't get easier and that he wasn't going to get any less crazy, so I lit up in guilty solidarity. My father liked a brand of vodka called Peter the Great, and on that first day in Moscow I drank enough to begin liking it, too. My father and I hadn't seen each other in seven years. I wondered if I'd recognize him, thinking of the way some men in their late fifties begin to look elderly almost overnight. But my father looked as I remembered him, still handsome and confoundingly fit, only his temples were grayer and the lines around the eyes more pronounced. We spent nearly the entire day talking in the kitchen, but to me our voices sounded tentative and oddly formal. Since I'd left Russia, we'd spoken occasionally over a sputtering long-distance phone line and met a handful of times, adding up to maybe three or four weeks spent together over two and a half decades. Unlike that of most fathers and sons, our relationship hadn't been worn into a recognizable shape by familiarity. We were closely related strangers. To my frustration, I once again became quiet and strangely passive around my father--a condition exacerbated by my shortage of Russian words to describe adult emotions. Well, not a shortage of words, exactly. What I lacked was the ability to put them together in ways that enabled adult modes of conversation: irony, doubt, tenderness, reserve. And so in my father's presence I spoke less than I did otherwise and was cowed by my silence, which in turn made me feel not only mute but dumb. He asked, as he always did, whether I'd seen any movies lately. My father liked old films enough to make them his livelihood: he dubbed classic Hollywood and European films into Russian and sold the not entirely legal VHS tapes and DVDs at a storefront in one of the newish strip malls that ringed Moscow. Sometimes he was paid--by scrap-metal magnates and natural-gas-company lawyers--to assemble private video collections in loose-leaf binders with titles like "The New Wave" and "Early Hitchcock." He had been an academic of sorts once but was a business owner now in the fledgling post-perestroika middle class. We shared the fondness for old movies, particularly American ones, and after a few glasses of vodka he began to recite lines of film dialogue in hilariously accented English: "Whoa, take her easy there, Pilgrim." He told me about The Band Wagon , an MGM musical from 1953. It had a dance scene he liked, filmed on a set that looked like Central Park. Halfway through, my father said, you can tell that Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire have fallen in love, and just then his eyes looked excitable and impossibly young, the way they did when I was a child. I always liked how easily he laughed. When he did, our awkwardness and odd formality gave way to something like joy--both unfamiliar and childishly primal--and I could tell he felt it too. But after a moment or two, a self-consciousness intruded and the elation was gone. When I asked about Vassily, my father became evasive and glum, and I said nothing more until I remembered that I came to Moscow to find out about the two of them. "There isn't much to tell," he said, looking away. "It's all pretty boring." In spite of my discomfort with Russian, I knew that I had him pinned, there behind the chipboard table in his kitchen. He responded to my questions with gestures of bodily discomfort. His eyes beseeched me to change the subject, but this was important, I told him, I needed to know. He winced and lit another cigarette, chain-smoking irritably in silence. When he spoke finally, it felt like the giving of a heavy door. My father's first memory of his father was watching him count money. They lived in a communal prerevolutionary apartment near the Hotel Metropol, a few steps from Red Square, alongside families of other state security officers. Vassily coaxed the bills into neat stacks and laid them gingerly into a shoe box that he kept on a high closet shelf, along with his pistol. He never quite figured out how to spend his extravagant major's salary and lavished much of the money on clothes, for which he had a keen eye, ordering dozens of monogrammed shirts and gabardine suits from the Kremlin tailors. My grandmother Tamara designed women's clothes for an atelier that furnished the city's dress shops. When the two of them went out, they looked like one of the smart modern couples from the pages of Harper's Bazaar , a magazine Tamara pried away from a colleague of Vassily's who lived upstairs and whose job it was to monitor foreign mail. It was 1949 and my father was three or four years old. It occurred to me that my father's was a decidedly uncommon set of memories for someone growing up in Moscow in the late 1940s. Ninety percent of Moscow's apartments had no heat, and nearly half had no plumbing or running water; in winter, people going out for water carried axes along with their buckets, to hack through the ice that grew around the public water pumps; workers stacked firewood brought from the countryside on street corners in piles that sometimes grew taller than a building; siblings went to school on alternate days because they shared a single pair of shoes. But the Kremlin elite never prided itself on being egalitarian. The war was over. Vassily and Tamara went dancing, vacationed on the Black Sea. At home, my father remembered, she covered every surface with red and white carnations in cut-crystal vases, floral bouffants that gave the room the look of a funeral parlor. They dined on caviar and smoked sturgeon sent over as part of Vassily's rations. On New Year's Eve--the secular Soviet Christmas--Tamara put out porcelain bowls filled with pomegranates and oranges and decorated the tree with tinsel and crystal bells, arranging presents and sometimes a pineapple under the bottom branches. My father tore the wrapping open after supper on the thirty-first, and after he was put to bed, the neighbors gathered around the radio console in the hallway and waited for midnight, toasting the New Year with a sparkling wine labeled Soviet Champagne. Moscow was rising from the wartime mire. Excerpted from Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning by Alex Halberstadt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Family Trees | p. x |
Prologue: The Forgotten | p. xiii |
1 The Bodyguard | p. 1 |
2 Number 19 | p. 73 |
3 The Motherland Calls | p. 161 |
Epilogue: Camp Success | p. 257 |
Acknowledgments | p. 287 |
Photo Credits | p. 291 |