{
    "id": 376199,
    "slug": "young-heroes-of-the-soviet-union-a-memoir-and-a-reckoning",
    "nstc": null,
    "title": "Young heroes of the soviet union: a memoir and a reckoning",
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    "description": "<b>In this&#160;&ldquo;urgent and enthralling reckoning with family and history&rdquo; (Andrew Solomon),&#160;an American writer returns to Russia to face a past that still haunts him.&#160;</b><br>&#160;<br><b>NAMED ONE OF&#160;<i>THE NEW YORK TIMES&#160;</i>CRITICS&rsquo; TOP BOOKS OF THE YEAR<br></b><br>Alex Halberstadt&rsquo;s quest takes him across&#160;the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth, where decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. In Ukraine, he tracks down his paternal grandfather&mdash;most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin. He revisits Lithuania, his Jewish mother&rsquo;s home, to examine the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for. And he returns to his birthplace, Moscow, where his grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers&rsquo; wives, his mother consoled dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a dangerous living by selling black-market American records. Halberstadt also explores his own story: that of an immigrant growing up in New York, another in a line of sons separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history.&#160;<br>&#160;<br><i>Young Heroes of the Soviet Union</i> is a moving investigation into the fragile boundary between history and biography. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family&rsquo;s formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suffering, 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&rsquo; lives.",
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    "language_code": "eng",
    "original_language_code": null,
    "page_count": 320,
    "duration_seconds": null,
    "publication_date_first": "2020-03-10",
    "publication_date_latest": "2020-03-10",
    "cover_url": null,
    "editions": [
        {
            "isbn": "9781400067060",
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    "created_at": "2025-09-19T13:33:20+00:00",
    "updated_at": "2025-11-05T00:32:06+00:00",
    "publisher": {
        "id": 4108,
        "slug": "random-house-us",
        "name": "Random House US",
        "created_at": "2025-09-19T13:07:56+00:00",
        "updated_at": "2025-09-19T15:10:09+00:00"
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    "contributors": [],
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    "subjects": [
        {
            "scheme_identifier": "32",
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            "subject_code": "680",
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