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Bezig met laden... Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoningdoor Alex Halberstadt
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 Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek.  tmiller1018 | Mar 10, 2020 |  geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
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. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)305.892Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Groups of people Ethnic and national groups ; racism, multiculturalism Other GroupsLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (4.38)
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In the beginning of the book, there is the results of an experiment conducted in 2013 by researchers at Emory University. The experiment questions whether or not trauma can be inherited. This is the route that I expected Young Heroes of the Soviet Union to take. It did not. What this book is, however, is a memoir and nothing else.
When I read the synopsis for this book, the experiment results in the beginning, and studied the cover of the book, I have to admit that I automatically assumed that it was going to be more of a clinical read. I was pleasantly surprised. The journey that Alex set himself upon couldn't have been an easy one emotionally.
The Holocaust is a subject that should be talked about, studied in schools, and kept alive through those conversations. If we don't know and/or understand history, how can we learn from it and keep from repeating it? This book isn't just about the Holocaust. In fact, it is only mentioned at certain points throughout the book.
As many books as I have read, as many movies/documentaries that I have watched on the subject of the Holocaust, I did not know that Russia treated their Jewish communities not much, if any, better than the Germans. The older generations lost everything. Their families, their homes, livelihoods, and for many, their lives. Learning of his family's losses, seeing the differences in how they were treated (Alex included), knowing of and living through so much cruelty, had to be heartbreaking.
This memoir is an example of the strength, bravery, and perseverance of the Jewish people. It also sends us on the journey with Alex to find his and his family's truths, to form a relationship with his (Russian) father and grandfather, and I believe more than anything, to find himself. (