When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone
Gal Beckerman (HMH, $30)
In this enthralling narrative of the Jewish struggle for emigration from the Soviet Union, Gal Beckerman shows how, in his words, “a small number of willful individuals on both sides of the iron curtain took on the superpowers.” And won.
Through scores of interviews, Beckerman is able to recount this 30-year struggle for human rights with novelistic detail, starting his tale in the forests outside Riga in the 1960s, where future refusenik Yosef Mendelevich found his heritage, and culminating in the release of Natan Sharansky and the opening of the floodgates. But there is also the drama played out in the U.S., especially in New York, where the “Soviet Jewry” issue, Beckerman shows, was hugely important in forming modern Jewish-American identity.
It is easy to forget at this remove that there was a time when Russians could not vacation in Turkey, could not worship as they pleased, could not emigrate. Beckerman brings that era vividly back to life, reminding us of one of the most significant human rights struggles of the post-war era. A must read.
The Holy Thief
William Ryan (Minotaur, $24.99)
And now for something completely different. Well, maybe not completely. After all, detective novels based in Stalinist Russia are an emerging trend (Child 44, City of Thieves) that could well compete with Scandinavian noir.
Ryan’s debut takes place on the eve of the Great Purge, with the investigator and protagonist, Militia Captain Alexei Korolev, becoming increasingly conflicted as a gruesome string of murders draws into his sights all manner of unpleasantness, with a conspiracy that hits a bit close to home.
Ryan weaves a very compelling plot with well drawn characters (although his family name choices can be a bit odd, e.g. Andropov and Pushkin), and his 1930s Moscow is mostly believable, though it does have a slight British accent. One suspects that this is not the last we will hear of Captain Korolev.
Guardians
Photographs by Andy Freeberg
A beautifully artistic photo book that juxtaposes portraits of guardians – Russia’s ubiquitous museum room guards, with the works of art they are there to protect. Freeberg truly has a gift for combining his live and still subjects with stunning detail and empathy.
andyfreebergphotoart.com
The Littlest Enemies
Deborah Hoffman, trans.
(Slavica, $22.95)
Hoffman’s superb translation of Children of the Gulag is a profoundly significant indictment of the Soviet regime. A collection of memoirs, letters and dossiers of children condemned to spend time in the camps (excerpted in Russian Life, Nov/Dec 2007), it reminds that all too often children are the forgotten victims of adults’ utopian dreams.
Miss Gulag
This is quite simply one of the finest documentaries of this decade on life in Russia. Director Maria Yatskova uses the pretext of a beauty pageant held at a women’s prison outside Novosibirsk to examine the lives and fates of a handful of women caught up in the Russian prison system.
What results is a searing portrait of a grim archipelago, a touching look at the women’s families and communities, and a deeply nuanced portrait of Russian justice.
The cinematography and editing is brilliant, from the opening scene, where a woman in a Cinderella dress smiles and admits she is in for assault, to the Eisensteinian shots of administrators, to the calm panning of prisoners’ faces. Miss Gulag has a determinedly understated quality, capturing revealing details in a matter-of-fact way, without judging – from the contestants’ outlandish costumes, to visiting day, to the mundane details of one prisoner’s release.
Order this film online and/or contact your local PBS station and tell them they need to air this documentary.
missgulag.com
The Concert
On the artistic front (stuff like writing, believability, characterization, cinematography) this film is a must miss. Filled with hideous stereotypes, clichés and plot twists that demand Golden Gate scale suspensions of disbelief, The Concert is pure cheese. Mélanie Laurent and Aleksei Gutskov take two for the team and offer very touching, at times charismatic performances with what they have been given, but that is far from enough.
If you know anything about Russia (no, you can’t walk all the way to Sheremetyevo from Central Moscow) or music (no, you can’t assemble an orchestra and put on a concert without a single rehearsal), you will probably find The Concert hard to sit through. Yet for Russophiles there is at least one redeeming virtue: most of the acting is done in Russian by Russian actors. A refreshing change when too many films are full of non-Russians playing Russians and speaking something closer to Klingon than the real thing.
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