Above Water deals with effects of Nazism on Harry Rosen, a Latvian Jew. Harry has to endure the inferno of the Riga ghetto. He escapes from the ghetto and finds a hiding place in the apartment of Anna, sister of a friend. After the liberation of Riga, Harry marries Anna and studies at Riga University. Later, Harry and Anna decide to go to the United States. In New York, Harry publishes a book on modern history; to gather material for the book, he goes to Germany. In Berlin, he has an encounter with the now former SS officer whom he tricked thirty years ago in Riga when he escaped from the ghetto. The German does not recognize Harry. Harry’s German tour has ended. He has gathered the needed material for his next book.
Above Water is an important book about life in two totalitarian states–first, German-occupied Latvia, then the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
A new book of poems by New York poet, journalist, and essayist Sergei Shabalin. In Russian.
Sailor, artist, lawyer, and writer, Dmitri Bystrolyotov was one of a team of Soviet spies operating in the West between the World Wars. He seduced women to learn great secrets of foreign states, but was then arrested and tortured in the Gulag, where he began to document the crimes against humanity of the regime he had served.
This book features biographies of the author’s family members, detailing with the effect of the war on their lives.
The first bilingual collection of Ukrainian verse by Borys Khersonsky. In these poems, heaven is often the setting: Jews who perished during pogroms and in the Holocaust continue with their daily routines, whereas on earth, displacement has become a constant, and collective memory has been cleansed of the Jewish past.
A collection of very short stories. In Russian.
