A New York Times Notable Book * Winner of the National Jewish Book Award * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist "A gripping detective story, a stirring epic, a tale of ghosts and dark marvels, a thrilling display of scholarship, a meditation on the unfathomable mystery of good and evil, a testimony to the enduring power of the ancient archetypes that haunt one Jewish family and the greater human family, The Lost is as complex and rich with meaning and story as the past it seeks to illuminate. A beautiful book, beautifully written."--Michael Chabon In this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic--part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work--that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history. The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust--an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him. Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.

Stalin, like Hitler, remains the very personification of evil but also one of the creators of today’s world. Now in an enthralling biography that reads like a thriller, Simon Sebag Montefiore unveils the shadowy, adventurous journey of the Georgian cobbler’s son who became the Red Tsar.What makes a Stalin? Was he illegitimate? Was his mother whore or saint? Was Stalin a Tsarist agent or Lenin’s chief gangster? Was his most notorious heist planned during his stay in London? Was he to blame for his wife’s death? If he really missed the 1917 Revolution, how did he emerge so powerful?Born in poverty, scarred by his upbringing, exceptional in his studies, this charismatic but dangerous boy was hailed as a romantic poet and trained as a priest but found his mission as fanatical revolutionary. He became the mastermind of bank robberies, protection-rackets, arson, piracy, and murder yet he was, uniquely part-intellectual, part-brigand. Surprisingly, he is also revealed as a scandalously prolific lover, leaving a trail of mistresses (varying from schoolgirls to noblewomen) and illegitimate children. Her is the arch-conspirator and escape-artist whose brutal ingenuity so impressed Lenin that he made Stalin (with Trotsky) his top henchman. The paranoid underworld of Joseph Conrad-style terrorism was Stalin’s natural habitat. Montefiore shows how murderous Caucasian banditry and political gangsterism, combined with pitiless ideology, qualified Stalin to demonstrate the Kremlin – and create the USSR in his flawed image. Based on massive research and astonishing new evidence in archives from Moscow to Georgia, YOUNG STALIN, companion and prequel to bestselling, prizewinning STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR, is a chronicle of the Revolution, a pre-history of the USSR – and an intimate biography: this is how Stalin became Stalin.

"Award-winning journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy. In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow-only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up-doctors, engineers, scientists-had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values? In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin's lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate-and documents how that failure paved the way to the revanche of Vladimir Putin. Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak-and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women"-- Provided by publisher.

An important collection of writings and memoirs on the Russian Futurist movement from one of America's pre-eminent linguists and literary theorists. Born in Moscow in 1896, Roman Jakobson brought an extraordinary rare poet's sensibility to his exploration of language. This volume, which fills a major gap in the literature of the Russian avant-garde, is a lively collection of letters, memoirs, poetry, prose, and essays. It includes recollections of Mayakovsky, Khlebnikow and others.

Here is a panoramic view of Jewish life in Eastern Europe up to the time millions of Jews emigrated the the US. Using eyewitness accounts, Milton Meltzer helps restore a world almost unknown to today's American Jews, most of whom can find their roots in that past. It was a world that knew great joys--in family and community, in learning and religious life--as well as the deep sorrows of persecution and pogrom. Word portraits bring to life rabbi and revolutionary, Hasid and Haskalist, shochet and poet, Zionist and Bundist, millionaire and luftmensch. Just as vividly portrayed, and often in their own words, are the people of the shtetl, struggling to make a living, remarkable for their endurance and their refusal to let hope die. The author uses diaries, letters, documents, newspaper accounts, songs, maps, poems, memoirs, weaving them into a historical narrative that details what led Jews to abandon their old world and venture to the new.

From her political awakening as a high school student in tsarist-occupied Poland until her murder in 1919 during the German revolution, Rosa Luxemburg acted and wrote as a proletarian revolutionist. Rosa Luxemburg Speaks takes us inside the political battles between revolution and class collaboration that still shape the modern workers movement.

An outstanding dispatch from the frontline of war - unsparing, unsentimental, blackly comic and brutally beautiful - by and ordinary soldier who tells it like it is. Arkady Babchenko was still a naove 18-year-old when he and his fellow teenage conscripts arrived in a camp just north of Chechnya. Fresh off the truck, the new recruit rapidly learned the meaning of savagery and fear, before he'd even been near the front line. By the time he started his active duty, he had developed a tough skin against the harsh treatments meted out by his seniors and grew hardened and cynical. With unblinking honesty, Arkady Babchenko traces his journey from innocence to experience, taking the raw and mundane reality of war and twists it into compelling, chilling - and eerily elegant - prose.

This book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music. Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturityÑ Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces . Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism"Ñthe professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk artÑand how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music. Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed. Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.

1978 Viking Press hardcover, Irving Howe (World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made). A powerful biography detailing the life of the Russian revolutionary, political theorist, and politician.

On the night the SS rounded up the Jews of his Ukrainian ghetto, eighteen-year-old Yosel Epelbaum crawled on his hands and knees to a nearby forest. There he joined a diverse band of pro-Soviet partisans, led by a kind of warlord in the wilderness, who created a "forest republic" behind enemy lines. With his courageous comrades, Epelbaum disrupted the German war effort for almost a year and a half and saved hundreds of civilans at the same time. After the liberation. the young survivor became caught up in Europe's roaring black market. With little money or formal education, an knowing no English, he immigrated to San Francisco in 1947 and within a year opened an ice cream shop in the city's outlying, foggy Sunset District. Only a decade later Joe Pell was well on his way to becoming one of the leading real estate developers in Northern California. Taking Risks, related in a taut and vivid style, is his story--one of loss and torment but also daring, ingenuity, and uncommon resilience.

The author shares his impressions of Russia's people, landscapes, and historic sites, and recounts his experiences traveling across the Soviet Union

"A compendium of in-depth reports from all over the World, including Iran, North Korea, Bhutan, Japan, Pakistan, Israel, Africa, Turkey and China"--Amazon.

One afternoon in December 1992, Yuri Lotman sat down to dictate to his assistant. These sessions were spread out over that winter and into the spring of 1993—the final spring of Lotman's life. The result is this book of memories and recollections. Five sections concern a single anecdote or theme—lice on the front, an encounter with a hare, a "totally Bulgakovian" episode, a visit from the KGB, Tartu School politics. The remaining two sections supply the narrative backbone of the memoir, focusing on the passage of time: school and frontline life, the end of the war, and postwar university life. --

Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much controversy as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s extraordinary life and extensive writings have left an indelible mark on revolutionary conscience; and yet there was at one time a danger that his name would disappear altogether from history. Isaac Deutscher’s magisterial three-volume biography was the first major publication to counter the powerful Stalinist propaganda machine, and in this definitive work Trotsky emerges in his real stature, as the most heroic, and ultimately tragic, character of the Russian revolution. This first volume of the trilogy, originally published in 1954, traces Trotsky’s political development: his early activities, the formation and crystallization of his distinctive and motivating idea—the permanent revolution— his long feud and final reconciliation with Lenin and Bolshevism, and his role in the October insurrection of 1917. The volume ends in the year 1921, when Trotsky, then at the climax of his power, unwittingly sowed the seeds of his own defeat.

From Tajikistan to the Moon is an inspirational, true story of the spellbinding events of World War II, the author s escape from his war-torn country, his flight to freedom, and his ultimate success in America. Told from a unique Soviet perspective, Robert Frimtzis takes you from surviving bombs of the Nazi blitzkrieg, to imminent starvation and deprivation in a mud hut in Tajikistan, to contributing to America's lunar exploration and spacecraft development. Without warning, his childhood was shattered, his home was destroyed, and he was plunged into the madness and savagery of World War II. His family evaded Nazi capture by running eastward 3,000 miles to Tajikistan. To get to America they crossed borders illegally, trekked across half of Europe, and eventually ended up in a displaced persons camp in Italy. At nineteen, penniless and knowing little English, he arrived in America with the goal to continue his education.

From Tajikistan to the Moon is an inspirational, true story of the spellbinding events of World War II, the author's escape from his war-torn country, his flight to freedom, and his ultimate success in America. Told from a unique Soviet perspective, Robert Frimtzis takes you from surviving bombs of the Nazi blitzkrieg, to imminent starvation and deprivation in a mud hut in Tajikistan, to contributing to America's lunar exploration and spacecraft development. Without warning, his childhood was shattered, his home was destroyed, and he was plunged into the madness and savagery of World War II. His family evaded Nazi capture by running eastward 3,000 miles to Tajikistan. To get to America they crossed borders illegally, trekked across half of Europe, and eventually ended up in a displaced persons camp in Italy. At nineteen, penniless and knowing little English, he arrived in America with the goal to continue his education.