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.

... is most interesting where it documents lives other than Halberstadt’s own.

To a Russian ear, Halberstadt’s stories sound conventional and even a bit clichéd: his descriptions of Soviet poverty, humiliating shortages, pervasive censorship, ubiquitous lies, and the late Soviet infatuation with Western pop culture are all familiar. A Russian reader is sure to catch a few inaccuracies. In the end, during a quiet fishing trip in a faraway Russian province, the author develops a kind of awkward affection for his father. He does not become any more Russian, but he leaves Russia a wiser man..

What I found to be most compelling about this memoir, and there was a lot to be considered, was the relation to geography, the physical place in which Halberstadt was writing about, animating, and the emotional landscape. In his prose, the two types of land become one, merging. When recounting the story of his maternal Grandparents, the story of Lithuanian Jews between the two capital cities of Kaunas and Vilnius, he anchors these family members spiritually to their environments. He not only reports historical information of violence and antisemitism, but the lasting effects of genocide and bloodshed on a landscape.

... terrific, gripping.

Halberstadt’s skill at rich description is double-edged: on one side, he clearly portrays the everyday life of the Soviet Union, of his childhood experiences there and in the United States. The visceral details that bring these places to life also make his stories of war and violence painfully vivid.

In the ultimate act of self-retrospection, Halberstadt...investigates his identity by traveling to Russia, his country of birth, to interview family and document the horrifying effects of the world wars.

...[an] illuminating but dense memoir.