Review: Young Heroes of the Soviet Union by Alex Halberstadt

reviewed by Joshua Sokol

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union
Alex Halberstadt
Random House, March 2020
$28.00; 320 pp.
ISBN: 978-1400067060

Digging through the innermost parts of one’s memory is not a singular act. It requires a critical look at the ideas and experiences that shaped not only you, but those who came before you as well. The way in which we grieve, the tone of our voices, even the shape of our pallets is a generational echo forged in fires long before us. Traumas and narratives are genetic, embedded in our skin and oftentimes, buried within graves in countries we’ve never seen and inscribed in languages that we do not know. It is easy to dismiss these facts about ourselves, that our existence does not have a lineage and therefore the past cannot touch us if too distant. The ghosts, and for some, the demons, have ways of reaching them in extraordinary ways. We carry weight completely unseen.

Alex Halberstadt, a New York resident born in Moscow, learned in 2004 that his Grandfather, Vassily, was alive and sitting idle in Ukraine as a relic of the corpse of Joseph Stalin. Vassily, long thought dead by Halberstadt, was one of the last remaining traces of people dutied with protecting and acting as a personal bodyguard to the USSR Premier. This history and this reality, that Halberstadt’s Grandfather was an instrument in the war crimes of the Soviets, was a lesson in familial trauma as well as generational and emotional distance.

About six years into writing Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, Emory University published a study observing the effects of adverse conditions on two generations of mice, studying their reactions and seeing how it manifested in offspring. This is, in essence, Halberstadt’s thesis: can trauma be inherited? “This, I understood finally, was history: not the ordered narrative of books but an affliction that spread from parent to child, sister to brother, husband to wife.”

As history often is, Halberstadt’s paternal Grandfather was completely separate from him, having no impact on the narrative of his lived experience. There was a tendency to mythologize this man, manifesting him in ambiguity and moral grayness. There was never a clear-cut image as to who this man truthfully was, always shifting in and out of a presence that often comes with oral tradition. Stories become skewed and bias comes in the form of those alive to tell the tale. “… he was described as a Communist Zealot, an emotional cipher, an imbecile, a negligent father and husband, an impeccably mannered gentleman, a dandy, a martinet.”

This method of redeeming the past, of upturning old ghosts that may hold secrets to what lies in the darkest parts of your organism, it is a reparative means of confrontation. Halberstadt’s method, go to the places in which these aspects of your past cannot hide, corner them where they lay their head.

In a beautiful, scenic section of the memoir, Halberstadt and his father, Viacheslav walk the streets of Moscow to discuss the architectural metamorphosis of the city from Eastern Orthodox grandiose to the leveling of God in place for the Brutalist aesthetics of the Soviets. These two narratives are interwoven, the power struggle between tradition and modernity, what is lost in the throws, what is tossed into the fire and what is gold plated. He cites the monumental Cathedral of Christ the Savior that was replaced in ideology by Stalin’s new sense of the USSR’s aesthetic identity, the concrete, geometric Palace of the Soviets. Replacing one God with another, recycling the guise of tradition under a different mask.

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. The Neris River, which runs through central Lithuania and into Belarus, is a landscape that’s steeped in history, contemporary and ancient. Along the riverbank are the graves and sacred grounds of Pagan Lithuanians who revered the oaks groves and saw the river as transport to their eternal resting place. It is a geological and cultural site of pride for the country. But this river is also where Lithuanian “White Armbands” in 1941 rounded up Jews from Slobodka and murdered them, waist deep, naked in the ancient waters. Halberstadt recounts all of this, without sparing detail.

This is a way to hold history accountable, especially in a country where the truth about their role in genocide is largely evaded. We cannot deny that the grounds we live on are oftentimes shaped by violence.

When reading this memoir, I couldn’t help but draw conclusions from my own family’s history. My paternal side of the family is majority Lithuanian, and fiercely Roman Catholic. They were in Lithuania in a very undocumented and unaccounted for time between 1920 and 1937. Nobody has a record of where in the country they were settled, what their reasoning was for being there, or why it was they came back to the United States. This has led to a sort of mythologizing of my family’s story: what happened in that time, and what role did my family have in the history. When my great-grandmother Marcella passed away in 1975, all traces of the old country faded. They stopped speaking Lithuanian, no more cultural food was made, it was a halt in tradition that was due to a need to Americanize and assimilate. It was identity covering, and lingers in my mind that no one ever discussed familial origins.

I gave up a while back trying to trace paperwork and immigration records, the history is too muddy and the people who were alive to see it are all passed. Names were changed too many times, they were Russified, Anglicized, and Americanized. Some things are buried and are not meant to be exhumed. I took the hint.

Memoirs exist to make the personal, public and in turn make a story political. These accounts made me think of the secrets my own Soviet family possessed, their role in atrocity and what was lost in the interim between worlds. More importantly, what trauma, anger and unseen weight have I inherited, completely unaware of the origins?

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.

“Once the past is reduced to a handful of photos and family stories, it becomes optional. Or so I believed.”

Joshua Sokol is a journalism student and the assistant arts editor at the Berkeley Beacon, Emerson College’s student newspaper. His work covers cultural institutions and art within the Greater Boston area.