Above Water
Above-Water-Leon-Kossman
Above Water
by Leon Kossman Леонид Косман

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.

Also on our Bookshelf:

by Michael Romm

This book features biographies of the author’s family members, detailing the effect on their lives.

by Borys Khersonsky. Svetlana Lavochkina and Oksana Rosenblum, translators

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.

by Mikhail Iossel

The author has found a perfect syntactical solution to the opposition of past and present in this groundbreaking collection of one-sentence stories: everything is simultaneous, breathless, in a dizzying spin of memory and imagination.

by Yelena Matusevich

A collection of very short stories. In Russian.

 

by Maxim Matusevich

Six Trains of No Return collects twelve short stories and novellas that examine immigrant sagas and dislocations.

by Zinovy Zinik

When Clea returns to London with her new Russian husband, she is surprised to see him become even more eccentric.