More than a retelling of Vassily’s story, Young Heroes is a memoir of Halberstadt’s family and the country where he was born — a loving and mournful account that’s also skeptical, surprising and often very funny ... confident, precisely drawn imagery that will make you remember what Halberstadt describes in his own unforgettable terms ... A thread that runs through Halberstadt’s book is the inheritance of trauma...another version of the historical record that gets inscribed into our genetic code. Those parts of the book are elegantly delineated, but it’s the unexpected specificity of Halberstadt’s observations that ultimately make this memoir as lush and moving as it is.
Halberstadt twitches aside the dismissive curtain we tend to drape over the older members of our families ... What he finds is startling but ought to be familiar in its own way to each of us ... As Halberstadt weaves his familial background out of several trips across Russia and Eastern Europe in a quest for information, a curious effect occurs. Time becomes less linear and seems to lie around us, piled in no particular order, like snow. The past is still present with us; nothing is truly left behind.
... he writes Vassily’s story as best he can, adding some background and filling the landscape with monsters of his own invention. We almost never hear from Vassily directly. What we get is an omniscient narrator’s third-person account of what Vassily did or thought (or may have done or thought). The sole direct confession—about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944—gets the same treatment, with no follow-up questions ... There is plenty of archival information ... But Alex does not go to the archives, has no clue about the time and place he dreams about, and does not ask Vassily any specific questions (from what we can tell) ... The unease the reader feels over...novelistic passages is made more acute by the obvious implausibility of some elements of the background ... When locating hell in countries with names, pasts, and flesh-and-blood inhabitants, writers—especially memoirists—are expected to set limits to their imagination.
An act of literary archaeology ... Its finely wrought prose ranges from Moscow in the 1930s to Vilnius in the 50s and New York in the 80s, melding the genres of biography, history and memoir. The book is more than just an account of one family’s ordeals: it is an engrossing account of dictatorship, war and genocide, and how the toxic legacy they left behind has etched itself into successive generations of Soviet citizens. Consumed by Halberstadt’s own longing for meaning, it meditates on the power of storytelling to bind our unstable and episodic memories into a coherent narrative – and on the gaps and enigmas that make this impossible. Halberstadt is both interrogator and grandson ... It is not, however, a triumphant tale of self-discovery and self-healing. Again and again, Halberstadt’s relatives refuse to yield to his need for confession, reconciliation and redemption.
... is most interesting where it documents lives other than Halberstadt’s own ... Halberstadt’s most serious misstep occurs in the epilogue, when a Volga fishing trip with his estranged father takes him to what used to be the Mongol city of Sarai Batu. This precipitates an abrupt and bizarre journey through Russian history, in which Halberstadt claims that an array of attributes sometimes displayed by modern-day Russians date back to the Tatars, from high cheekbones to their aversions to foreigners, to discussing the past, to democracy...It is one thing to suggest that trauma is passed down from father to son, to explore how the memory of terror lives on in one’s own life. It is quite another to suggest that this inheritance can apply to a diverse and varied nation, to describe all Russians as a 'people trembling seemingly without cause, like the lab mice at Emory'. Alex Halberstadt’s own reporting suggests that not all Russians experience history in the same way, and that those who do tremble have good cause indeed.
To a Russian ear, Halberstadt’s stories sound conventional and even a bit clichéd: his descriptions of Soviet poverty, humiliating shortages, pervasive censorship, ubiquitous lies, and the late Soviet infatuation with Western pop culture are all familiar. A Russian reader is sure to catch a few inaccuracies. In the end, during a quiet fishing trip in a faraway Russian province, the author develops a kind of awkward affection for his father. He does not become any more Russian, but he leaves Russia a wiser man.
What I found to be most compelling about this memoir, and there was a lot to be considered, was the relation to geography, the physical place in which Halberstadt was writing about, animating, and the emotional landscape. In his prose, the two types of land become one, merging. When recounting the story of his maternal Grandparents, the story of Lithuanian Jews between the two capital cities of Kaunas and Vilnius, he anchors these family members spiritually to their environments. He not only reports historical information of violence and antisemitism, but the lasting effects of genocide and bloodshed on a landscape ... Halberstadt, through his writing, dispels the myth that tragedy cannot happen in beautiful places ... Halberstadt, and his family’s story, is the living example of taking advantage of resources and stories while they are still alive and willing to be told. Young Heroes solves the question of how shifts in cultures, say from the USSR to America, can affect an individual, on a minuscule scale that affects the quietest of family dynamics and the mundane realities of our day to day lives.
... terrific, gripping ... a superb evocation of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s, a world of drab poverty and oppression, but also young rebels listening to pop music, wearing western fashions and reading dissident poetry.
Halberstadt’s skill at rich description is double-edged: on one side, he clearly portrays the everyday life of the Soviet Union, of his childhood experiences there and in the United States. The visceral details that bring these places to life also make his stories of war and violence painfully vivid ... makes clear the links between family, nation and belonging that many take for granted ... The lessons shared here are far from unique to Halberstadt’s individual circumstances, allowing his experiences to resonate broadly across cultures, nations and identities.
In the ultimate act of self-retrospection, Halberstadt...investigates his identity by traveling to Russia, his country of birth, to interview family and document the horrifying effects of the world wars ... Such a personal history stands apart from other titles because, although the journey is framed as a family narrative, historically detailed episodes are impressively illuminated. Particularly commendable is the archival research on Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital ... An impeccably executed and unique genealogy that encourages us to examine the history that informs us of who we are.
...[an] illuminating but dense memoir ... Halberstadt is at his best when writing about his own youth, and his interviews with family members are affecting. Readers who can stick with this when it gets into the genealogical weeds will find much to appreciate in this insightful and moving narrative.
