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The last book on my Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10 list is Yenta Mash’s On the Landing, one of the best Yiddish writers you’ve never heard of, whose short stories were translated into English by Ellen Cassedy.
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My next selection for the Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10 is Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, by historian David Shneer, which uncovers the role of Jewish photographers in the Soviet photography industry.
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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.
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My seventh book for the Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10 is an award-winning poetry book, small things left behind. Full disclosure — the author is my mother, Ella Zeltserman. This is my most deeply personal, and yes, very biased, selection for the list.
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The next book on my Soviet-Jewish Decade Top 10 list is Anya von Bremzen’s culinary memoir, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing, which brings fresh meaning to the food on our tables.
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My fifth pick for the top works of the Soviet-Jewish decade is Operation Wedding, a documentary about an almost forgotten story of true heroism that helped thrust the Soviet-Jewry movement into the spotlight.
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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.
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My third pick for the top works in the Soviet-Jewish world this decade is Breaking Stalin’s Nose, by Eugene Yelchin. It’s one of the very few books for kids about the Soviet period, and explains the mechanisms of the Stalinist era the eyes of a 10-year-old.
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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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As the decade comes to a close, I’m looking back at how the Russian-Jewish world has changed. Ten years on, we’re awash in words, in music, in art, in film, and more coming out all the time.
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