Download Free The Matryoshka Memoirs Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Matryoshka Memoirs and write the review.

A granddaughter explores the story of her Ukrainian grandmother’s survival of Hitler’s forced labor camps Irina Nikifortchuk was 19 years old and a Ukrainian schoolteacher when she was abducted to be a forced laborer in the Leica camera factory in Nazi Germany. Eventually pulled from the camp hospital to work as a domestic in the Leica owners’ household, Irina survived the war and eventually found her way to Canada. Decades later Sasha Colby, Irina’s granddaughter, seeks out her grandmother’s story over a series of summer visits and gradually begins to interweave the as-told-to story with historical research. As she delves deeper into the history of the Leica factory and World War II forced labor, she discovers the parallel story of Elsie Kühn-Leitz, Irina’s rescuer and the factory heiress, later imprisoned and interrogated by the Gestapo on charges of “excessive humanity.” This is creative nonfiction at its best as the mystery of Irina’s life unspools skillfully and arrestingly. Despite the horrors that the story must tell, it is full of life, humor, food, and the joy of ordinary safety in Canada. The Matryoshka Memoirs takes us into a forgotten corner of history, weaving a rich and satisfying tapestry of survival and family ties and asking what we owe those who aid us.
An American historian, film specialist, and documentary filmmaker shares candid stories of his life in Russia during and after the Cold War. A captivating lifetime of personal and professional experiences by an American historian, film specialist, and documentary filmmaker in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. The author’s experiences as a radical in the turbulent 1960s, and his eventual disenchantment offer some precedents and perspectives to all those on the Left, Center, or Right interested in the fluctuations of American politics. The vivid log of hopes and disillusions is related in a candid, non-academic style, and set against a panorama of history and politics in the late twentieth century. “A self-described scholar-activist, Menashe weaves together political, intellectual, and cultural currents of leftist life, and draws a vivid picture of people and places, life-changing adventures, the intellectual and political challenges of graduate school during the Cold War, encounters with key Russian literary and political figures, and much more. Then comes the crash, the Soviet Union’s end. As in all failed love affairs, Menashe retains some sweet memories. The reader will taste them long after reading the memoir.” —Carole Turbin, Professor Emerita, History and Sociology, SUNY/Empire State College
"Lyrical and emotionally gutting." —O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE “Intellectually satisfying [and] artistically profound.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW) “Mesmeric.”—THE PARIS REVIEW “Vividly awesome and truly great." —EILEEN MYLES “Gorgeous, gutting, unforgettable." —LENI ZUMAS “Brilliant.” —MICHELLE TEA An arresting memoir equal parts refugee-coming-of-age story, feminist manifesto, and meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and art that follows award-winning writer Sophia Shalmiyev’s flight from the Soviet Union, where she was forced to abandon her estranged mother, and her subsequent quest to find her. Russian sentences begin backward, Sophia Shalmiyev tells us on the first page of her striking lyrical memoir. To understand the end of her story, we must go back to the beginning. Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev was raised in the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where anti-Semitism and an imbalance of power were omnipresent in her home. At just eleven years old, Shalmiyev’s father stole her away to America, forever abandoning her estranged alcoholic mother, Elena. Motherless on a tumultuous voyage to the states, terrified in a strange new land, Shalmiyev depicts in urgent, poetic vignettes her emotional journeys through an uncharted world as an immigrant, artist, and, eventually, as a mother of two. As an adult, Shalmiyev voyages back to Russia to search endlessly for the mother she never knew—in her pursuit, we witness an arresting, impassioned meditation on art-making, gender politics, displacement, and most potently, motherhood.
Once again your quest to discover how my life as a gigolo began is bound between two covers. And, yes, all of the personal memoirs I’ve recounted have occurred in my life exactly as described, yet ala Mr. Robert Leroy Ripley’s famous words you may choose to “believe it or not.” On the other hand, perhaps my book’s provocative contents could prove a bit too much for you? While you’re pondering that determination I’ll reiterate that it was my mother whom envisioned my life should be lived as a gigolo and that my personal perception’s always been that living such a carefree lifestyle could lead to a fascinatingly splendid life, one filled with fun, adventure, excitement, and more. Fortunately for all my perception has proven to be spot on, which I’ve now chosen to share with you. My first book introduced you to my very unique upbringing and development of a stellar reputation. This novel, the second of my introductory trilogy, provides you with an even deeper level of insight. Thusly, if romance, intimacy and sensuality are all subject matters you find utterly captivating, then by all means please sally forth as I guarantee that your eyes will be opened wide and your imagination will find myriad new avenues to explore, along with intriguing places to visit and decadent experiences to revel in during your travels along the meandering, mesmerizing paths that compose these early memoirs of my life.
An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
This ebook boxed set includes 3 complete memoirs of Henry Kissinger, detailing his life and work. White House Years: One of the most important books to come out of the Nixon Administration, White House Years covers Henry Kissinger’s first four years (1969–1973) as Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Years of Upheaval: This second volume of Henry Kissinger’s monumental memoirs covers his years as President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State (1972–1974), including the ending of the Vietnam War, the 1973 Middle East War and oil embargo, Watergate, and Nixon’s resignation. Years of Upheaval opens with Dr. Kissinger being appointed Secretary of State. Years of Renewal: This third and final volume of memoirs completes a major work of contemporary history. The third & final volume begins with the resignation of Nixon and takes the reader through the years of Ford's administration, in which Kissinger continued to play a decisive role. Years of Renewal is the triumphant conclusion of a major achievement and a book that will stand the test of time as a historical document of the first rank.
From the co-author of the #1 New York Times bestselling series The Magic Misfits comes a spectacularly creepy novel that will keep you up way past bedtime. Perfect for fans of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark! Amelia is cleaning out her grandmother's attic when she stumbles across a book: Tales to Keep You Up at Night. But when she goes to the library to return it, she's told that the book never belonged there. Curious, she starts to read the stories: tales of strange incidents in nearby towns, of journal entries chronicling endless, twisting pumpkin vines, birthday parties gone awry, and cursed tarot decks. And at the center of the stories lies a family of witches. And witches, she's told, can look like anyone... As elements from the stories begin to come to life around her, and their eerie connections become clear, Amelia begins to realize that she may be in a spooky story of her own... With hair-raising, spine-chilling prose, Dan Poblocki delivers a collection of interconnected stories that, if you're anything like Amelia, is sure to keep you up late in the night.
Three modernist women, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), Mina Loy (1882-1966), and Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), came to define the interwar avant-garde through their experimental writing and unconventional pursuits. In Staging Modernist Lives, Sasha Colby dramatizes these women’s lives and writing in three new plays that traverse the origins of modernism, Parisian literary circles, two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and race and gender relations in the first half of the twentieth century. Leveraging each writer’s autobiographical materials, the plays explore the work of H.D., Loy, and Cunard as artists, publishers, and activists, their quests for self-definition amid political and historical upheaval, and their development as modernists among mentors, detractors, lovers, and friends including Bryher Ellerman, Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Arthur Cravan, D.H. Lawrence, and Pablo Neruda. Navigating the emerging field of research-creation, Staging Modernist Lives maps the critical terrain for dramatized literary inquiry. Bridging scholarship and creative practice, extant biographical drama and the possibilities of research-theatre, Staging Modernist Lives demonstrates how performance can deliver literary history to new audiences - and how research in turn reinvigorates itself through performance.
This book proposes an alternative modernist tradition, a line of writers captured by the archaeological project and the poetic possibilities it created. This tradition spans from Théophile Gautier's mid-nineteenth-century passion for Egyptology to Charles Olson's literal excavations on the Yucatan peninsula in the 1950s. With attention to the historical development of archaeology, the author argues that the archaeological became a rich site of cultural fantasy, a location where modernity's alternatives could be considered, imagined, and transcribed. These models, taking their cue from new archaeological dynamics, include the ushering of primal intensities into the present, the tapping of the subterranean unconscious, and the decipherment of an original poetic language. Ranging from psychic excavations to the reactivation of political templates, the plumbing of the archaeological landscape became a key posture in modernist development, which the author pursues through the work of both twentieth-century modernists and their nineteenth-century substrata. Ambitious in scope, this book provides a compelling argument about the role of archaeology in the modernist literary imagination and the century-long evolution of the poetics of excavation.