Young Heroes of the Soviet Union
A Memoir and a Reckoning
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Narrated by:
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Alex Halberstadt
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By:
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Alex Halberstadt
About this listen
In this "urgent and enthralling reckoning with family and history" (Andrew Solomon), an American writer returns to Russia to face a family history that still haunts him.
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 century-old cycle of estrangement.
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 three generations of his family. He visits Lithuania, his Jewish mother’s home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. And he returns to his birthplace, 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, Halberstadt traces 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 10-year-old boy struggling with identity, rootlessness, and a yearning for home, he became another in a line of sons who grew up 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.
Cover art: Komar and Melamid, What Is to Be Done? (from the Nostalgic Socialist Realism series), 1983 (photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s)
©2020 Alex Halberstadt (P)2020 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"In this urgent and enthralling reckoning with family and history, Alex Halberstadt describes the disjunction between his Soviet childhood and his American adolescence with incandescent wit, a sometimes bitter but always compelling nostalgia, and great literary flair. This book is a triumph over the shame he experienced as he was growing up, and a narrative of his struggle against steep odds to become a whole person." (Andrew Solomon)
"As a boy, the author of this haunting book immigrated to the United States, changed his name, and turned his back on his Soviet past. As a man, he reclaimed it, wrestled with it, and ultimately faced it head-on. The result is an exploration of family and memory that stayed with me long after I turned the last beautifully written page." (Anne Fadiman, author of The Wine Lover's Daughter)
"I remember being in a bar with Alex Halberstadt almost 20 years ago, talking about our families, when he said, ‘Did I ever tell you my grandfather was Stalin’s bodyguard?’ He hadn’t. I suggested that he write a book about it. Not in my most hopeful imaginings could that book have turned out to be as surprising, sad, funny, and engrossing as the one he wrote. This is history as memoir, and vice versa. Describing Russia in the twentieth century as a place where ‘the buffer between history and biography became nearly imperceptible,’ he made me feel how this is true of all places, for all of us." (John Jeremiah Sullivan)
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Story
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant - the postwar optimism seemed assured. A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities.
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Great book. I wish the pictures had been included.
- By Lindsay on 02-28-20
By: Sarah M. Broom
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Pnin
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
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Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
- By Darwin8u on 01-13-20
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Hiding Place
- By: Corrie ten Boom, Elizabeth Sherrill, John Sherrill
- Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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At one time, Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that she had a story to tell. For the first 50 years of her life, nothing out of the ordinary ever happened to her. She was a spinster watchmaker living contentedly with her sister and their elderly father in the tiny house over their shop in Haarlem. Their uneventful days, as regulated as their own watches, revolved around their abiding love for one another. But with the Nazi invasion and occupation of Holland, everything changed....
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Inspiring
- By Sara on 03-03-14
By: Corrie ten Boom, and others
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The First Man
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In The First Man, Albert Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds, and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellsprings of Camus's aesthetic powers and moral vision.
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Great Narration by Jefferson Mays
- By Sean Patrick Stevens on 07-31-21
By: Albert Camus
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The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
- My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
- By: Lucette Lagnado
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado recreates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years before Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. With Nasser’s nationalization of Egyptian industry, her father, Leon, a boulevardier who conducted business in his white sharkskin suit, loses everything and departs with the family for any land that will take them. The poverty and hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to Paris to New York are strikingly juxtaposed against the beauty and comforts of the lives they left behind.
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A Touching Memoir of a Jewish Family in Egypt
- By Brustar on 06-10-20
By: Lucette Lagnado
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The Nazi’s Granddaughter
- How I Discovered My Grandfather Was a War Criminal
- By: Silvia Foti
- Narrated by: Gabrielle de Cuir, Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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A deathbed promise leads a daughter on an incredible journey to write about her grandfather who was a famous war hero. But this journey had a terrible destination: the discovery that he was a Nazi war criminal.
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A Compelling Story Well Told
- By Catherine S. Read on 03-17-22
By: Silvia Foti
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The Parisian
- By: Isabella Hammad
- Narrated by: Fiona Button
- Length: 20 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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A masterful debut novel by Plimpton Prize winner Isabella Hammad, The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle for independence.
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Overly ambitious
- By Placeholder on 06-16-19
By: Isabella Hammad
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Black Dog of Fate
- A Memoir
- By: Peter Balakian
- Narrated by: Peter Balakian
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The first-born son of his generation, Peter Balakian grew up in a close, extended family, sheltered by 1950s and '60s New Jersey suburbia. He was immersed in an all-American boyhood defined by rock 'n' roll, adolescent pranks, and a passion for the New York Yankees that he shared with his beloved grandmother. But beneath this sunny world lay the dark specter of the trauma his family and ancestors had experienced: the Turkish government's extermination of more than a million Armenians.
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Great book!
- By Lm on 06-27-13
By: Peter Balakian
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After the Last Border
- Two Families and the Story of Refuge in America
- By: Jessica Goudeau
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The welcoming and acceptance of immigrants and refugees have been central to America's identity for centuries - yet America has periodically turned its back in times of the greatest humanitarian need. After the Last Border is an intimate look at the lives of two women as they struggle for the 21st-century American dream, having won the "golden ticket" to settle as refugees in Austin, Texas.
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Great Content. Odd Structure.
- By Susan Stillings on 02-10-21
By: Jessica Goudeau
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The Library of Legends
- A Novel
- By: Janie Chang
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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China, 1937: When Japanese bombs begin falling on the city of Nanking, 19-year-old Hu Lian and her classmates at Minghua University are ordered to flee. Lian and a convoy of more than 100 students, faculty, and staff must walk 1,000 miles to the safety of China’s western provinces, a journey marred by hunger, cold, and the constant threat of aerial attack. And it is not just the student refugees who are at risk: Lian and her classmates have been entrusted with a priceless treasure, a 500-year-old collection of myths and folklore known as the Library of Legends.
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Wonderful and Umique!
- By D. Fields on 02-18-22
By: Janie Chang
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The Shadow Lines
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Raj Varma
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali - as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian-born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.
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Narrator Doesn't Know How to Pronounce
- By Amazon Customer on 08-27-11
By: Amitav Ghosh
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Inge's War
- A German Woman's Story of Family, Secrets, and Survival Under Hitler
- By: Svenja O'Donnell
- Narrated by: Kristin Atherton
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up in Paris, the daughter of a German mother and an Irish father, Svenja O'Donnell knew little of her family's German past. In this transporting and illuminating audiobook, the award-winning journalist vividly reconstructs the story of her grandmother Inge's life from the rise of the Nazis through the brutal postwar years, from falling in love with a man who was sent to the Eastern Front just after she became pregnant with his child, to spearheading her family's flight as the Red Army closed in, her young daughter in tow.
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Ordinary German Citizens Caught Up
- By Hinterlander on 08-22-23
By: Svenja O'Donnell
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Who Is Vera Kelly?
- By: Rosalie Knecht
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA. Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake of a coup, Vera learns the Cold War makes for strange and unexpected bedfellows.
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not a whole lot of spycraft just a good story
- By Kirra Krussman on 01-19-19
By: Rosalie Knecht
What listeners say about Young Heroes of the Soviet Union
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Gillis Heller
- 01-06-21
Thoroughly enjoyed it despite the melancholia
I heard about this book on a podcast reviewing Robert Draper’s book To Start a War. At the end of the podcast, Draper recommended this book as a reflection on the decay of Soviet and Russian society. This book was certainly that but also a deeply personal story of immigration and loss. Very touching.
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- John David
- 09-16-20
Compelling Memoir
Beautifully written and read by the author. A bittersweet masterpiece of periods, places, personalities, and power, all brilliantly woven together as a family “memoir and reckoning.” A fascinating story of grandfather who was Stalin's bodyguard; an horrific story of the Lithuanian Holocaust; a compelling story of life in Cold War Soviet Union; and a very personal story of life in New York for a young, gay Jewish emigre. A different kind of book. Educational and evocative. Distinctive yet universal. Moving. Practically perfect in conception & execution.
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- turgan@monomood.com
- 09-21-21
some depth and some historical narration
The book started with a nice trip across continents to Russia find mysteries of a family and mysteries of a history in USSR, its intriguing. However the second chapter suddenly dives into "History of Jews in Lithuania" which seems to be a completely different subject for a completely different book. Then the subject is all around the place all the way at some pooint to some kids (relatives of author) dressing as american indians, for no absolute reason. Its hard to focus what is happening for what purpose and clearly has no connection to Soviet union.
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