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Maybe someday
46
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
43/100Critics
50/100Scholars
Author:
Alex Halberstadt
Publisher:
Random House
Date:
March 10, 2020
In this reckoning with family and history, an American writer returns to Russia to face a family history that still haunts him.
What The Reviewers Say
More than a retelling of Vassily’s story, Young Heroes is a memoir of Halberstadt’s family and the country where he was born — a loving and mournful account that’s also skeptical, surprising and often very funny.
Halberstadt twitches aside the dismissive curtain we tend to drape over the older members of our families.
... he writes Vassily’s story as best he can, adding some background and filling the landscape with monsters of his own invention. We almost never hear from Vassily directly. What we get is an omniscient narrator’s third-person account of what Vassily did or thought (or may have done or thought). The sole direct confession—about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944—gets the same treatment, with no follow-up questions.
An act of literary archaeology.
