Three generations shadowed by Soviet history

Writer Alex Halberstadt returns to Russia to piece together his family's fractured history across Ukraine, Lithuania and Moscow, including his grandfather's possible role as one of Stalin's bodyguards and his mother's experience of antisemitism in Lithuania.

He weaves these discoveries together with his own immigrant upbringing in New York, exploring how the trauma of Soviet totalitarianism can pass quietly down through a family.

A thoughtful memoir for readers interested in twentieth-century Eastern European history and its long personal aftershocks.

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