Overview

In this luminous memoir of identity, exile, ancestry and reckoning, Alex Halberstadt returns to Russia to face a family history that still haunts him. 'Engrossing' Daniel Beer, Guardian 'A beautiful book... incisive, radiant' Olivia Laing 'Illuminating, dramatic... majestic writing' Spectator 'Enthralling... a triumph' Andrew Solomon Alex 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 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.

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Reviews

I remember being in a bar with Alex Halberstadt almost twenty 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 Reading Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is an immersion in waters of profound depth and bracing lambency. The light glows in the quiet acuity of the prose. And it shines on vast and dire patterns that transcend the merely personal-the unfathomable hardships that nations and families inflict on people, and how we endure. This truly excellent book will transform your understanding of what memoir can do. -- Wells Tower 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 Alex Halberstadt is a magnificent writer. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is a beautiful book about trauma and its impact on one extraordinary family, and an incisive, radiant look at the long legacy of suffering and war. A loving and mournful account that's also skeptical, surprising and often very funny... It's the unexpected specificity of Halberstadt's observations that ultimately make this memoir as lush and moving as it is. -- Jennifer Szalai * New York Times *

Fascinating. -- Julia Llewellyn Smith * Mail on Sunday * Reading Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is an immersion in waters of profound depth and bracing lambency. The light glows in the quiet acuity of the prose. And it shines on vast and dire patterns that transcend the merely personal-the unfathomable hardships that nations and families inflict on people, and how we endure. This truly excellent book will transform your understanding of what memoir can do. -- Wells Tower [An] elegant testimony to the subordination of human life to the will of an overmighty state. -- Robert Leigh-Pemberton * Daily Telegraph * 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 I remember being in a bar with Alex Halberstadt almost twenty 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 This terrific, gripping book, part family memoir, part history...[is] a superb evocation of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and '70s, a world of drab poverty and oppression, but also young rebels listening to pop music, wearing western fashions and reading dissident poetry. -- David Herman * Jewish Chronicle * With its diverse stories, Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is excellent as a record of how a single family can be tied up in so many strands of history... Halberstadt has a surprising lightness of touch (given the weighty subject matter), allowing him to deftly explore the impact of his family's past on the present. It is a very good way of chronicling the individual alongside the behemoth of twentieth-century history: a fascinating and impactful read. -- India Lewis * Arts Desk * Alex Halberstadt is a magnificent writer. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is a beautiful book about trauma and its impact on one extraordinary family, and an incisive, radiant look at the long legacy of suffering and war. An illuminating, dramatic and wistful family memoir... [Halbertstadt] has a knack for memorable images... It's as if his feelings about Russia were frozen in time when he emigrated, leaving shards of perception that are peculiarly incisive... Majestic writing. -- Matthew Janney * Spectator * A loving and mournful account that's also skeptical, surprising and often very funny... It's the unexpected specificity of Halberstadt's observations that ultimately make this memoir as lush and moving as it is. -- Jennifer Szalai * New York Times *

I remember being in a bar with Alex Halberstadt almost twenty 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 Reading Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is an immersion in waters of profound depth and bracing lambency. The light glows in the quiet acuity of the prose. And it shines on vast and dire patterns that transcend the merely personal-the unfathomable hardships that nations and families inflict on people, and how we endure. This truly excellent book will transform your understanding of what memoir can do. -- Wells Tower 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 Alex Halberstadt is a magnificent writer. Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is a beautiful book about trauma and its impact on one extraordinary family, and an incisive, radiant look at the long legacy of suffering and war.

Author Information

Alex Halberstadt is the author of the award-winning Lonely Avenue- The Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, GQ and The Paris Review. He is a two-time James Beard Award nominee and a recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He works and lives in New York.

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