{"product_id":"book-dgar","title":"Young Heroes of the Soviet Union","description":"\u003cb\u003eCan 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.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Can trauma be inherited?\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003eIt 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eCover art:\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eKomar and Melamid, \u003c\/i\u003eWhat Is to Be Done?\u003ci\u003e (from the Nostalgic Socialist Realism series), 1983 (photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s)\u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Penguin Random House","offers":[{"title":"Audiobook","offer_id":49327698772272,"sku":"BDdgar","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0879\/2784\/9264\/files\/410826-dgar-Square.jpg?v=1733696864","url":"https:\/\/downpour.com\/products\/book-dgar","provider":"Downpour","version":"1.0","type":"link"}