Young Heroes of the Soviet Union

A Memoir and a Reckoning

De: Alex Halberstadt

Narrado por: Alex Halberstadt

Can trauma be inherited? 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 ten-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)

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.

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.

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.