Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10 List: Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart

Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10: Little Failure

Little Failure: A Memoir, by Gary Shteyngart, is my next book on the Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10 list. It’s not the first or only Russian-Jewish memoir. No, its significance lies in its ability to capture the complexities of becoming an American (and does so in a way that resonates for Canadian readers, too), and leaving behind the Soviet world.

Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10 - A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman

Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10: A Replacement Life

Today’s pick for the Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10 list is Boris Fishman’s A Replacement Life. I first read it in 2014 when it came out, and somehow, with the politics of the last few years, the book feels more important now than it did then — less for the insight into Slava’s split identity, and more for the close-up of his grandfather’s generation.

Soviet-Jewish Decade Gal Beckerman book

Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10: When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone

My first selection for the top 10 Russian-Jewish works of the decade is journalist Gal Beckerman’s When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone. Published in 2010, the book was — and remains — the first and most comprehensive history of the Soviet-Jewry movement. It won the National Jewish Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and was named a book of the year by the Washington Post.

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