Overview

An insightful memoir delving deeply into the modern Russian immigrant experience. A violent crime shattered Moscow native Anya Gillinson's world when she was thirteen years old, urging her family to leave Russia for the American dream. As a teenager raised in a deeply patriarchal Russian society, Anya found herself grappling with a fiercely independent America. Her candid and heartfelt memoir delves into the clash between these two cultures through the stories of her family. It explores how her upbringing in Russia, and the subsequent immigrant experience,shaped her sense of femininity- a concept with vastly different definitions on either side of the Atlantic.Dreaming in Russian pitsthe two competing identities of her immigrant selfagainst one another. After over thirty years of living in America, in the grip of its indefatigable modernism, Gillinson has come to understandthat her bones, brains,and womanhood remain deeply rooted in the soil of Russian patriarchy. Anya's journey forces questions, yet in the end it leaves her without answers,but at least with a personal resolution- that three decades of living in America have brought her back to her Russian past, which forever predetermined her present and outlined her future.

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9781510782129

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Reviews

"""What a fascinating and compelling book. Anya has poignantly preserved an intimate view of a world very few have seen or experienced, and she tells her story with humor, grace and honesty. Her story becomes our story. Somewhere, her Russian family ancestors are smiling.""--Michael Feinstein ""Anya Gillinson has written a deeply-moving, brutally honest, and utterly majestic account of her life as a Soviet Jew who finds a new birth of Jewish identity and freedom in the United States. From a privileged incarceration in Soviet Russia to the highest heights of social status in New York City, as an accomplished attorney and wife to the head of one of the world's most celebrated music institutions, Anya's story of triumph and tragedy, love and loss, and hope and longing is uniquely suited to our turbulent and confusing times. Like light from the darkness, Anya's story of overcoming the tragic murder of her renowned father to rebuild a life of fortitude and conviction will inspire all those who have grappled with unspeakable loss. As antisemitism rears its reptilian head in the United States and abroad, Anya's moral courage and ferocious pride as a Jew who revolves in the grandest echelons of American society will inspire people of every ethnicity to embrace their heritage, as we all seek to finally realize the as yet unfulfilled American dream of being 'one indivisible nation under God.'""--Shmuley Boteach, ""America's Rabbi,"" international bestselling author of Judaism for Everyone and The Israel Warrior"

"""What a fascinating and compelling book. Anya has poignantly preserved an intimate view of a world very few have seen or experienced, and she tells her story with humor, grace and honesty. Her story becomes our story. Somewhere, her Russian family ancestors are smiling.""--Michael Feinstein"

Author Information

Anya Gillinson was born in Moscow, Russia, into the family of a renowned physician and a concert pianist. When she was thirteen years old, her father was killed during a botched robbery on his first and last visit to New York. Two years after his death, Anya moved to New York with her mother and younger sister and went on to graduate from high school, college, and eventually law school. She considers it a privilege to practice law and to be able to be useful to people, but literature has always been her true calling. In 2015, she published a volume of poetry in Russian, Suppress in Me the Strive To Love. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

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