By Masha Gessen
ISBN-10: 0385336055
ISBN-13: 9780385336055
Within the Nineteen Thirties, as waves of battle and persecution have been crashing over Europe, younger Jewish ladies begun separate trips of survival. One, a Polish-born girl from Bialystok, the place nearly the total Jewish neighborhood may quickly be despatched to the ghetto and from there to Hitler’s focus camps, was firm not just to reside yet to reside with satisfaction and defiance. the opposite, a Russian-born highbrow and introvert, could finally turn into a high-level censor below Stalin’s regime. At war’s finish, either ladies discovered themselves in Moscow, the place informers lurked on each nook and anti-Semitism reigned. It used to be there that Ester and Ruzya could first move paths, there that they grew to become the nearest of pals and realized to belief one another with their lives.
In this deeply relocating kin memoir, journalist Masha Gessen tells the tale of her liked grandmothers: Ester, the quicksilver insurgent who constantly battled the forces of tyranny; Ruzya, a unmarried mom who joined the Communist occasion below duress and made the compromises the regime exacted of all its electorate. either misplaced their first loves within the warfare. either suffered unsatisfied unions. either have been talented linguists who made their residing as translators. And either had children—Ester a boy, and Ruzya a girl—who may develop up, fall in love, and feature young children in their personal: Masha and her more youthful brother.
With grace, candor, and meticulous learn, Gessen peels again the layers of secrecy surrounding her grandmothers’ lives. As she follows them via this amazing 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 ahead of them her great-grandfather, attempted to navigate a deadly line among judgment of right and wrong and compromise.
Ester and Ruzya is a spellbinding paintings of storytelling, packed with political intrigue and passionate emotion, acts of braveness and acts of betrayal. without delay an intimate family members chronicle and a desirable old story, it interweaves the tales of 2 girls with an excellent imaginative and prescient of Russian historical past. the result's a memoir that reads like a novel—and a unprecedented testomony to the bonds of relatives and the ability of desire, love, and endurance.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Additional resources for Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace
Example text
Ester turned out not to be quite so much bigger than Ruzya. She had recently had two hip operations, which made her shorter and slowed her down. She was not an old woman—two years to go before her seventieth birthday—and she had a penchant for bright colors. Her lipstick was a glossy fuchsia. Her skin was always the shade of a good tan, and this was more noticeable now that her hair had gone gray—tight silver curls piled high. She hugged me quickly, and just as quickly—before I had a chance to introduce my companion or say anything at all—ran through her plans for me: it was clear she had not entertained the possibility that I might have made my own.
This is not the reason Ruzya dislikes her: after all, she, too, is a member of the Komsomol, as is everyone else, really. In fact, as a top student, she was among the first in her class to be inducted. But this girl goes overboard. It has been four years since Ruzya and Boba walked the streets of Moscow conjuring the Communist utopia. A lot of things have happened in that time. Last year, the school began talking about the arrests. Ruzya can allow that all of those arrested were guilty. Or most of them.
She was a member of the Bund, the Jewish workers’ party. The wife of one of Bialystok’s most prominent Zionists worked as, of all things, a Polish teacher at a Yiddish school. That is, while her husband devoted much of his life to promoting the study of Hebrew for the Jews’ eventual return to Palestine, Bella earned her daily bread by helping Jewish children become that much more assimilated by learning the Polish language. But then, her independence did him proud, for she was a university graduate—an anomaly among Polish women at the time, especially Polish Jewish women, especially women from Chasidic families.
Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace by Masha Gessen
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