9780593154717
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Young Heroes of the Soviet Union audiobook

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Young Heroes of the Soviet Union Audiobook Summary

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)

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Young Heroes of the Soviet Union Audiobook Narrator

Alex Halberstadt is the narrator of Young Heroes of the Soviet Union audiobook that was written by Alex Halberstadt

About the Author(s) of Young Heroes of the Soviet Union

Alex Halberstadt is the author of Young Heroes of the Soviet Union

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Young Heroes of the Soviet Union Full Details

Narrator Alex Halberstadt
Length 5 hours 43 minutes
Author Alex Halberstadt
Category
Publisher Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date April 30, 2024
ISBN 9780593154717

Subjects

The publisher of the Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. includes the following subjects: biography, Stalin, Judaism, Jewish history, books for book clubs, best books for book clubs, dad, relationship books, fatherhood, parenting, trauma and memory, genealogy, ancestry, relationships, eastern europe, the great terror, world war ii, history books, Russian history, fathers and sons, grandfather, grief, fear, New York, Ukraine, Moscow, identity, immigration, Holocaust, Soviet Union, Russia, Alex Halberstadt, family history, family life, family, trauma, biographies and memoirs, history, memoir, memoirs, best books of 2020, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, History, Europe, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Family & Relationships, Parenting, Fatherhood The BISAC Subject Code is Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs

Additional info

The publisher of the Young Heroes of the Soviet Union is Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The imprint is Random House Audio. It is supplied by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. The ISBN-13 is 9780593154717.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

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