His search takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth.
And he comes to realize something more: nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens’ lives..
He comes to learn that he was merely the latest in a lineage of sons who grew up alone, separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history.
As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family’s formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage.
And he visits his birthplace, Moscow, where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers’ wives, his mother dosed dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a living by selling black-market jazz and rock records.
Finally, Halberstadt explores his own story: that of a fatherless immigrant who arrived in America, to a housing project in Queens, New York, as a ten-year-old boy struggling with identity, feelings of rootlessness and a yearning for home.
He returns to Lithuania, his Jewish mother’s home, to revisit the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for, learning that the boundary between history and biography is often fragile and indistinct.
In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal grandfather - most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin - to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family.
His search takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth
