This
is a wonderfully lively and revealing investigation into the life and work of Anton
Chekhov. The book is also partly the
story of Janet Malcolm’s pilgrimage to the cities in Russia where
Chekhov lived and worked.
Her reading
of Chekhov’s work is complemented by events from Chekhov’s personal life and
letters. I have been a fan of Janet
Malcolm for years because I’m captivated by her searing intelligence, her keen
eye, and her ironic wit.
On her
pilgrimage to Russia, Malcolm’s complicated relationship with her controlling Russian
guide offers some truly hilarious moments.
To illuminate the mysterious greatness of Anton Chekhov’s writings, Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer, and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov’s life and framed by an account of Malcolm’s journey to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Yalta. She writes of Chekhov’s childhood, his relationships, his travels, his early success, and his self-imposed “exile”—always with an eye to connecting them to themes and characters in his work. Lovers of Chekhov as well as those new to his work will be transfixed by Reading Chekhov.
In school, I was a math and science nerd but also loved to write. I got good grades, except in history; memorizing dates and events was boring. My dad loved history. When he told stories about historical figures, I was fascinated. In twelfth grade, my history teacher told stories like my dad, and I started acing the class. Since then, I’ve become obsessed with history and devour good historical books, particularly when they focus on the people who change history. And now, I’ve actually been in places at times when history was made.
As antisemitism is currently coming into fashion again around the world, I recommend this frightening true story of a young girl hiding from the Germans, Russians, and Ukrainians who were all looking to rob Jews or send them to their deaths during World War II.
It is sometimes hard to believe that people can be so cruel, but what I take away from this book is first, that these events will continue throughout history and second, that good people of strong will can survive any tragedy if they have hope, a strong will, and luck (or God) on their side.
A remarkable Holocaust memoir, a powerful testament to human courage and fortitude, for readers of Edith Eger's The Choice.
'This memoir is heartbreaking.' Elie Wiesel, author of Night 'Profoundly observed... remarkably lived... ferocious bravery.' New York Times __________
Alicia Jurman is five-years-old when her story begins. It is 1935 and she is living in the East Polish town of Buczacz. Although brought up in an atmosphere of anti-Semitism, nothing could have prepared her for the Russian invasion of Poland and the full horror of the Nazi Occupation.
At thirteen, while fleeing the Nazis through war-ravaged Poland, Alicia began saving the…
I’m the author of multiple middle grade and YA historical novels, including Torch, which won the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature. Torch takes place in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and it is especially timely in the face of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Bear (a popular symbol of the Russian Empire) has mauled many of its neighbors in the past century, not only Czechoslovakia and Ukraine but also the Baltic countries that, like Ukraine, were incorporated into the Soviet Union and the other Eastern European countries that were part of the Soviet bloc until the fall of Communism in 1989.
While there’s no shortage of WWII books for teens, this companion to Traitor is among the few that presents the eastern front and Ukrainian and Polish resistance fighters who battled each other, the Nazis, and the Soviets.
Today’s alliance between Poland and Ukraine reflects their mutual experience of oppression at the hands of larger powers that transcends their own historic differences. The unlikely romance in The Silent Unseen serves as a microcosm of this process.
Poland, July 1944. Sixteen-year-old Maria is making her way home after years of forced labor in Nazi Germany, only to find her village destroyed and her parents killed in a war between the Polish Resistance and Ukrainian nationalists. To Maria's shock, the local Resistance unit is commanded by her older brother, Tomek-who she thought was dead. He is now a "Silent Unseen," a special-operations agent with an audacious plan to resist a new and even more dangerous enemy sweeping in from the East. When Tomek disappears, Maria is determined to find him, but the only person who might be able…
I’ve always been drawn to stories about Jewish survival. My mother’s family were Yiddish-speaking Jews from Belarus, and as a child I was often asking questions about what their world was like before it was destroyed. I later studied at Brandeis University where I earned my doctorate in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, and then taught Jewish Literature at the University of Toronto. When my novel Come Back for Me was published, it felt as though many of my lifelong passions had finally come together in one book. Yet I’m still asking questions. My second novel (almost completed!) continues my quest to further my knowledge of all that was lost.
This is the kind of novel that stays with you long after you finish reading it.
It shows how some individuals can survive even the worst circumstances if they possess tenacity, hope, and perhaps most importantly, the determination to work together as a group.
To the Edge of Sorrow is the story of a disparate group of Jewish partisans during World War Two who use whatever skills they possess to survive Nazi tyranny. This not only involves foraging for food or constructing temporary shelter. Some also devote themselves to spiritual and intellectual pursuits, despite their degraded circumstances.
I found it particularly inspiring to read about the strength and endurance of the Jewish spirit despite the attempt by the Nazi regime to obliterate the entirety of Jewish life in Europe.
If I were a supermarket pie, my label would say, ‘Made in the UK with Chinese ingredients.’ Born in Wales to parents from Guangzhou and Hong Kong, my Cantonese is appalling, I’m bad at maths, and I can barely ride a bike without falling off. In short, I am an example of a real-life person and not a cliché or stereotype from the sorts of books we used to have to read if we wanted to see diverse characters. It’s about time the stories we read and the shows we watch become so effortlessly diverse that we don’t even notice. I hope my novels are playing a part in making that commonplace.
This is another book I read that made me think that the story of immigration into a provincial, rather than big city, setting was something people would read. It also made me think, that all parents, immigrants or not, have a massive calling to be deeply embarrassing.
Marina’s story to publication is an inspiring one, too. She was fifty-eight when this, her debut novel, was published.
Concealed inside this comic tale of an octogenarian newly widowed father, finding romance with a much younger Ukrainian barmaid is a lesson that all immigrants must one day learn. Just because someone else is from the old country too, it does not necessarily mean they have your best interests at heart.
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainianis bestselling author Marina Lewycka's hilarious and award winning debut novel.
'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.'
Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must aside a lifetime of feuding to save their emigre engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin…
I read (and write) biography as much for history as for an individual life story. It’s a way of getting a personalized look at an historical period. When the book is a family biography, the history is amplified by different family members' perspectives, almost like a kaleidoscope, and it stretches over generations, allowing the historical story to blossom over time. The genre also opens a window into the ethos that animated this unique group of individuals who are bound together by blood. Whether it's a desire for wealth or power, the zeal for a cause, or the need to survive adversity, I found it in these family stories.
Zabar's, New York's world-famous food emporium, is the achievement of another Jewish immigrant family.
Author Lori Zabar's grandparents, before they were a couple, fled pogroms in Russia (now Ukraine) and made their way to New York. Together they worked at a variety of small food stores before starting their own in 1934. From then on, Zabar's helped define the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
The story here is one of hard work and eventual success in a family-run business, expanded to include dedicated non-family employees. The book also contains recipes, including two of my personal favorites - latkes and kugel.
The fascinating, mouthwatering story (with ten recipes!) of the immigrant family that created a New York gastronomic legend: “The most rambunctious and chaotic of all delicatessens, with one foot in the Old World and the other in the vanguard of every fast-breaking food move in the city" (Nora Ephron, best-selling author and award-winning screenwriter).
When Louis and Lilly Zabar rented a counter in a dairy store on 80th Street and Broadway in 1934 to sell smoked fish, they could not have imagined that their store would eventually occupy half a city block and become a beloved mecca for quality food…
It was through learning Russian in my Swiss high school that I first got interested in the history of Eastern Europe. When I became fascinated by the theory of nationalism during my university studies, my geographical focus shifted to Ukraine, a society whose aspiration to nationhood has been repeatedly been contested by the neighboring great powers. For my first book, I researched the history of a fascinating nationally bifurcated family whose members have left archival traces from Moscow to Liubljana and from Kyiv to Stanford. I hold a BA degree from the University of Geneva, an MPhil from the University of Oxford, and a PhD from the University of Basel.
This was one of the first books that got me interested in the history of nineteenth-century Kyiv. Freshly published when I began my graduate studies, Faith Hillis’s book is detailed micro-history of local politics in the Ukrainian capital from the early nineteenth century to the revolution of 1905.
In particular, Hillis recounts the rise of a local Russian nationalist movement and does a great job at explaining why the city – and all of Ukraine – came to occupy such a central place in the political imagination of Russian imperialists and nationalists. And several members of the Shul’gin family – the protagonists of my own book – also make an appearance!
In Children of Rus', Faith Hillis recovers an all but forgotten chapter in the history of the tsarist empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River-which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine-was one of the Russian empire's last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the long nineteenth century, this newly acquired region nearly a thousand miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. Claiming to restore the ancient customs of the East Slavs, the southwest's…
My passion for Ukraine and its incredible people began when I managed a European Union aid programme there in the 1990s. Ukraine had just become an independent nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union and we were supporting its path to democracy. I travelled throughout this stunning country umpteen times and met thousands of warm, welcoming people, who quickly found their way into my heart. The Road to Donetsk is my tribute to Ukraine. It won the 2016 People’s Book Prize for Fiction, an award I dedicated to the Ukrainian people. Today, my memories of all those I met weigh heavily on my mind.
I loved this highly readable history of Ukraine. Written in the early 1990s,when I too worked in Ukraine, Borderlandbegins with the newly independent nation’sstruggle to build itself a national identity. Reid captures this time and its people so well – the peasant women in the covered market, the old men playing chess in Independent Square. Ukraine is literally translated as, ‘on the edge’ or ‘borderland’ and Reid explores the toll of its history – pograms, famine, purges, war, Holocaust, and Chernobyl… She travels through villages of whitewashed cottages, bringing their hardy inhabitants to life with her often quirky observations. She meets old folk who were alive during the famine of 1932/33, others who survived the gas chambers. At every turn, the magnificent Ukrainian spirit is in vibrant evidence.
Borderland tells the story of Ukraine. A thousand years ago it was the center of the first great Slav civilization, Kievan Rus. In 1240, the Mongols invaded from the east, and for the next seven centureies, Ukraine was split between warring neighbors: Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Austrians, and Tatars. Again and again, borderland turned into battlefield: during the Cossack risings of the seventeenth century, Russia's wars with Sweden in the eighteenth, the Civil War of 1918--1920, and under Nazi occupation. Ukraine finally won independence in 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bigger than France and a populous as Britain,…
I loved Erin Litteken’s multi-generational novel The Lost Daughters of Ukraine because it dared to explore the complicated Ukrainian story during the Second World War.
Having unraveled a bit of my own Ukrainian-born mother’s experiences, I appreciate the effort and research behind Litteken’s work. Fictionalizing family trauma is never without risk and I commend Litteken’s skill in exploring this minefield of emotion and memory.
The brand new historical novel from Erin Litteken, bestselling author of The Memory Keeper of Kyiv, based on her family's heart-wrenching escape from war-torn Europe.
A story of the strength of the human spirit, the personal cost of conflict and how love can be found even in the darkest times.
Summer 1941. War rages in Europe. The Germans march towards Ukraine. Halya, Liliya and Vika are no strangers to sorrow. They lost family during the Holodomor, loved ones in Stalin's purges, and war looms once more on the horizon.
Vika lives in fear for her children. She and her sister…
I am an award-winning historian, biographer, and political commentator. As a specialist in Soviet history, my books have been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Finnish, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.
The Ukraine crisis began in 2014 with the popular "Maidan" uprising that toppled the country’s pro-Russian president. Russia’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula was followed by civil war and the takeover by pro-Russian rebels of Eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Sakwa focuses on the international factors that exacerbated internal splits within Ukraine. Crucially, the crisis might have been avoided altogether if the United States, EU, and NATO had found a way to incorporate Russia into the post-Cold War order in Europe that emerged after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
The unfolding crisis in Ukraine has brought the world to the brink of a new Cold War. As Russia and Ukraine tussle for Crimea and the eastern regions, relations between Putin and the West have reached an all-time low. How did we get here? Richard Sakwa here unpicks the context of conflicted Ukrainian identity and of Russo-Ukrainian relations and traces the path to the recent disturbances through the events which have forced Ukraine, a country internally divided between East and West, to choose between closer union with Europe or its historic ties with Russia. In providing the first full account…
