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Delves into the author's ancestry, providing a partial slice of Russian Jewish history. The book also offers an individual perspective on what it meant to grow up in the Soviet Union in the aftermath of WWII. It also gives a personal account of the rise and development of Jewish national awareness, and describes the struggle for the immigration to Israel in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.
List of contents
Note on Transliteration List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Foreword 1. Ancestry 2. Immediate Family 3. Growing Up in Postwar Soviet Russia 4. Emergence of National Awareness and the Struggle for Immigration to Israel 5. Arrest, Imprisonment, Trial, and Aftermath 6. Life in Israel 7. Graduate Studies in the United States 8. Living, Teaching, and Writing in America Afterword Index
About the author
Gavriel Shapiro is Professor of Comparative and Russian Literature at Cornell University. His major publications include Nikolai Gogol and the Baroque Cultural Heritage (1993), Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading” (1998), (ed.) Nabokov at Cornell (2003), The Sublime Artist’s Studio: Nabokov and Painting (2009), and The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father (2014).
Summary
Delves into the author's ancestry, providing a partial slice of Russian Jewish history. The book also offers an individual perspective on what it meant to grow up in the Soviet Union in the aftermath of WWII. It also gives a personal account of the rise and development of Jewish national awareness, and describes the struggle for the immigration to Israel in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.
Additional text
"Thanksgiving All Year Round is most appropriately named. It is the buoyant saga of an incorrigible optimist. Nothing daunted, Shapiro first flings himself against the all-powerful Soviet regime by which he is made to feel a misfit and then against the red-tape and apparent idiosyncrasies of the free societies to which he has escaped and where he is determined to make good. Written by a person with an obvious literary flair, Shapiro's book provides manifestly authentic details of everyday life in the intellectual milieu of Moscow after Stalin and will be read avidly by students of Soviet society and of the Soviet Jewish movement."