Author: Emil Draitser Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520254465 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
"This memoir conveys us back to Draitser's childhood and adolescence and provides a unique account of post-Holocaust life in Russia. We live side by side with young Draitser as he struggles to reconcile the harsh values of Soviet society with the values of his working-class Jewish family. Despite the waves of anti-Jewish campaigns, which swept over the country and climaxed in the infamous "Doctors' Plot," we feel the Draitsers' loving family life - lively, evocative, and rich with humor. This intimate story ends with the death of Stalin and, through the author's anecdotes about his ancestors, presents a sweeping panorama of two centuries of Jewish history in Russia."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Emil Draitser Publisher: Northwestern University Press ISBN: 0810126648 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 465
Book Description
Living a life that seems incredible even for a spy novel, Dmitri Bystrolyotov was a sailor, doctor, lawyer, and writer, fluent in many languages, whose success as a spy hinged on the fact that he was a charming, handsome, and very adept at seducing women. He stole military secrets from Germany and Italy and fed Stalin information from all over Europe, with his conquests including a French embassy employee, the wife of a British official, and a disfigured Gestapo officer. His story took an unexpected turn when at the height of Stalin's purges he was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to hard labor in the Gulag, where he risked further punishment by documenting how the regime he once served fully and unquestioningly had descended into a monstrous legacy of crimes against humanity.
Author: Emil Draitser Publisher: Northwestern University Press ISBN: 0810141094 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
Set in the summer of 1979 at the height of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, Farewell, Mama Odessa is an autobiographical novel whose intertwined storylines follow a variety of people—dissidents, victims of ethnic discrimination, and black marketeers among them—as they bid farewell to their beloved hometown of Odessa, Ukraine, and make their way to the West. At the book’s center is Boris, a young writer thwarted by state censorship and antisemitism. With an Angora kitten for his companion and together with other émigrés, he puts the old country in his rear-view mirror and sets out on a journey that will take him to Bratislava, Vienna, Rome, and New York on his way to Los Angeles. Will Boris be able to rekindle his creative passion and inspiration in the West? Will other Jewish émigrés fit into the new society, so much different than the one they left behind? With humor and compassion, Farewell, Mama Odessa describes the émigrés’ attempts at adjustment to the free world.
Author: Emil Draitser Publisher: Wayne State University Press ISBN: 9780814323274 Category : Joking Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
Draitser uses humor as a means of understanding the attitudes and customs, beliefs and idiosyncrasies, and inter- and intra-group relationships of this multinational society. In analyzing the jokes, he seeks to determine what makes them funny, why certain groups are targeted, and even why a mediocre joke can be received with great enthusiasm.
Author: Anatole Konstantin Publisher: University of Missouri Press ISBN: 082626638X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 261
Book Description
Many children growing up in the Soviet Union before World War II knew the meaning of deprivation and dread. But for the son of an “enemy of the people,” those apprehensions were especially compounded. When the secret police came for his father in 1938, ten-year-old Anatole Konstantin saw his family plunged into a morass of fear. His memoir of growing up in Stalinist Russia re-creates in vivid detail the daily trials of people trapped in this regime before and during the repressive years of World War II—and the equally horrific struggles of refugees after that conflict. Evicted from their home, their property confiscated, and eventually forced to leave their town, Anatole’s family experienced the fate of millions of Soviet citizens whose loved ones fell victim to Stalin’s purges. His mother, Raya, resorted to digging peat, stacking bricks, and even bootlegging to support herself and her two children. How she managed to hold her family together in a rapidly deteriorating society—and how young Anatole survived the horrors of marginalization and war—form a story more compelling than any novel. Looking back on those years from adulthood, Konstantin reflects on both his formal education under harsh conditions and his growing awareness of the contradictions between propaganda and reality. He tells of life in the small Ukrainian town of Khmelnik just before World War II and of how some of its citizens collaborated with the German occupation, lending new insight into the fate of Ukrainian Jews and Nazi corruption of local officials. And in recounting his experiences as a refugee, he offers a new look at everyday life in early postwar Poland and Germany, as well as one of the few firsthand accounts of life in postwar Displaced Persons camps. A Red Boyhood takes readers inside Stalinist Russia to experience the grim realities of repression—both under a Soviet regime and German occupation. A moving story of desperate people in desperate times, it brings to life the harsh realities of the twentieth century for young and old readers alike.
Author: Peter Jan Honigsberg Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520943124 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
Jose Padilla short-shackled and wearing blackened goggles and earmuffs to block out all light and sound on his way to the dentist. Fifteen-year-old Omar Khadr crying out to an American soldier, "Kill me!" Hunger strikers at Guantánamo being restrained and force-fed through tubes up their nostrils. John Walker Lindh lying naked and blindfolded in a metal container, bound by his hands and feet, in the freezing Afghan winter night. This is the story of the Bush administration's response to the attacks of September 11, 2001—and of how we have been led down a path of executive abuses, human tragedies, abandonment of the Constitution, and the erosion of due process and liberty. In this vitally important book, Peter Jan Honigsberg chronicles the black hole of the American judicial system from 2001 to the present, providing an incisive analysis of exactly what we have lost over the past seven years and where we are now headed.
Author: Zvi Gitelman Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139789627 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Before the USSR collapsed, ethnic identities were imposed by the state. This book analyzes how and why Jews decided what being Jewish meant to them after the state dissolved and describes the historical evolution of Jewish identities. Surveys of more than 6,000 Jews in the early and late 1990s reveal that Russian and Ukrainian Jews have a deep sense of their Jewishness but are uncertain what it means. They see little connection between Judaism and being Jewish. Their attitudes toward Judaism, intermarriage and Jewish nationhood differ dramatically from those of Jews elsewhere. Many think Jews can believe in Christianity and do not condemn marrying non-Jews. This complicates their connections with other Jews, resettlement in Israel, the United States and Germany, and the rebuilding of public Jewish life in Russia and Ukraine. Post-Communist Jews, especially the young, are transforming religious-based practices into ethnic traditions and increasingly manifesting their Jewishness in public.
Author: Cristela Alonzo Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1501189212 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
"In this memoir full of humor and heart, comedian, writer, and producer Cristela Alonzo tells personal stories of growing up as a first-generation Mexican American in Texas and following her dreams to pursue a career in comedy" -- From book jacket flap.
Author: David Benioff Publisher: ISBN: 9781410409263 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 437
Book Description
From the critically acclaimed author of The 25th Hour comes a captivating novel about war, courage, survival and a remarkable friendship. Stumped by a magazine assignment to write about his own uneventful life, a man visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. Reluctantly, his grandfather commences a story that will take almost a week to tell: an odyssey of two young men determined to survive.
Author: Emil Draitser
Author: Emil Draitser
Author: Emil Draitser
Author: Emil Draitser
Author: Emil Draitser
Author: Anatole Konstantin
Author: Peter Jan Honigsberg
Author: Zvi Gitelman
Author: Cristela Alonzo
Author: David Benioff