By Masha Gessen
Within the Nineteen Thirties, as waves of conflict and persecution have been crashing over Europe, younger Jewish ladies all started separate trips of survival. One, a Polish-born girl from Bialystok, the place nearly the whole Jewish neighborhood might quickly be despatched to the ghetto and from there to Hitler’s focus camps, was resolute not just to dwell yet to stay with delight and defiance. the opposite, a Russian-born highbrow and introvert, could ultimately develop into a high-level censor below Stalin’s regime. At war’s finish, either ladies came across themselves in Moscow, the place informers lurked on each nook and anti-Semitism reigned. It was once there that Ester and Ruzya might first move paths, there that they grew to become the nearest of associates and discovered to belief one another with their lives.
In this deeply relocating kinfolk memoir, journalist Masha Gessen tells the tale of her cherished grandmothers: Ester, the quicksilver insurgent who continuously battled the forces of tyranny; Ruzya, a unmarried mom who joined the Communist occasion less than duress and made the compromises the regime exacted of all its voters. either misplaced their first loves within the struggle. either suffered unsatisfied unions. either have been talented linguists who made their dwelling as translators. And either had children—Ester a boy, and Ruzya a girl—who might develop up, fall in love, and feature little ones in their personal: Masha and her more youthful brother.
With grace, candor, and meticulous examine, Gessen peels again the layers of secrecy surrounding her grandmothers’ lives. As she follows them via this outstanding interval in history—from the Stalin purges to the Holocaust, from the increase of Zionism to the autumn of communism—she describes how every one of her grandmothers, and sooner than them her great-grandfather, attempted to navigate a perilous line among judgment of right and wrong and compromise.
Ester and Ruzya is a spellbinding paintings of storytelling, full of political intrigue and passionate emotion, acts of braveness and acts of betrayal. without delay an intimate kinfolk chronicle and a desirable old story, it interweaves the tales of 2 girls with an excellent imaginative and prescient of Russian heritage. the result's a memoir that reads like a novel—and a unprecedented testomony to the bonds of family members and the ability of desire, love, and endurance.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Additional info for Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace
Sample text
Ruzya was a doubter, and a lucky one, because every member of her gang seemed to lose his illusions at about the same pace, and this helped keep all of them safe. It was a gradual process, although Ruzya would remember several incidents as eye-opening; in any case, by the time she received her historian’s degree, she was sure that most of what she had been taught was a lie. MAY 1933 Ruzya is strolling with Boba, one of her classmates and also one of the gang. He is stout, round-headed, very talented in the sciences, and very happy, always, to discuss their respective dreams of future heroics.
Little Ruzya’s every step felt like his personal accomplishment, and the fact that she was attending school in Moscow made Moshe a successful man. Ruzya’s entering class, owing in no small part to the good graces and residual ethnocentrism of the Jewish first-grade teacher, who handpicked her group, comprised mostly the children of the Jewish intelligentsia—engineers, teachers, doctors, and more than anything else, accountants. They made a point of not thinking about their Jewishness. Stripped of religion—Ruzya’s parents had given it up with apparent ease—sprung from the Pale, and relieved of the myriad discriminatory laws that governed Jewish life in czarist Russia, they really did not see much point in even a secular Jewish identity.
But Ruzya decides she likes him, because he has a kind smile and he asks questions she likes answering. ” Ruzya loves to sing, but Eva hates it when she does. Eva can sing beautifully. Adults, especially men, often ask her to, and she leans against a wall and makes music with her voice. Ruzya decides to impress Uncle Lev with one of the songs from Eva’s repertoire. “ ‘I once loved you / And love may still …’ ” Uncle Lev leans back in his gray chair and laughs happily, loudly, and Eva laughs along with him.