The twentieth century has witnessed three great waves of Russian immigration to the United States. The first wave followed the Russian Revolution of 1917. Joseph Stalin's tyrannical rule was the cause of the second wave during the late 1940s and early 1950s. And then the third wave came, beginning with the age of
glastnost and
perestroika in the mid-1980s, and continuing to this day.
In
Red Blues, Dennis Shasha and Marina Shron have brought us a fascinating collection of personal stories told by those who are part of this third wave. Through their varied lifestyles and experiences these immigrants tell of a common juxtaposition between life in the former Soviet Union, which was materially poor but often culturally and personally rich, with life in the United States, which can be comparatively chaotic and uncomfortable but ultimately offers far greater opportunities.
The voices we hear come from a diverse group of personalities who tell their stories with no holds barred. The reader is given views of both the United States and Russia from a very unusual perspective—the honest words of strong people who have survived in both cultures.
"In Red Blues, Dennis Shasha and Marina Shron have brought us a fascinating collection of personal stories told by those who are part of [the] last wave ...of Russian Immigration to the United States."—Horace Mann Magazine
"Red Blues offers a window onto the daily struggles and personal transformations of immigrants of many backgrounds and personalities: Jews and non-Jews, soldiers, rocket scientists, painters and exotic dancers, a film director turned tailor, a dominatrix turned governess. Their oral memoirs are rich with detail, and shot through with strains of emotion that are too rarely included in immigrant studies. One comes away from this book feeling the bitter taste of lost culture and status, the exhilaration of testing oneself in a new culture, the ambivalence of loving the new and longing for the old."—Annelise Orleck, author of Soviet Jewish America
"Red Blues offers a fascinating picture of the experiences of recent Russian immigrants. Through a series of oral histories, the immigrants present their own stories of their lives in the former Soviet Union and why they left—and the challenges they face in making a new home in America. The stories make compelling reading.—Nancy Foner, author of From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration
"[In Red Blues] people compare what they left with what they came into. It isn't as one-sided as you might expect. America is another planet, they find, one with a fierce competitiveness and different values. The immigrants are frequently eloquent about the nature of friendships there, those communal bonds the precariousness of Soviet life fostered. The stories are as varied as the tellers. One says: to immigrate is to strip yourself bare. Maybe readers are archeologists rather than voyeurs, and find old clothes more interesting than naked bodies. That country, the Soviet Union, is no more. And this America is one not so much strange, as 'misaccustomed.' These are voices of people who, with little help or preparation, have had to unite different worlds within themselves."—Mark Halperin,
former Fulbright Lecturer at Moscow State Linguistic University