A YOUNG LAD IN THE SOVIET LAND

A young boy, born into the tumult of World War II, grows up under the harsh tyranny of the Soviet Union in this novel. 

David Lamm’s birth is spectacularly inauspicious—he comes into the world on June 22, 1941, the same day Germany attacks his native Beltsy, Moldova. His father, Samuel, leaves shortly after his birth to fulfill his military obligations. His mother, Ilana, eventually takes newborn David and his 9-year-old brother, Victor, to see Samuel’s brother, Aron, in Dnepropetrovsk, a town in Ukraine. They leave just in time—when the Nazis arrive, they mercilessly terrorize Beltsy—Ilana’s sister is raped and her mother murdered. The train ride traverses 4,500 kilometers, and when they arrive, Aron refuses to house them for long and sends them to a nearby refugee center, where their lives become freighted with “miserable poverty and chronic hunger.” The Lamms are eventually reunited, and return to find their home in Beltsy occupied by a KGB captain who refuses to leave until courts order him to. Tsesis (Communist Daze, 2017) closely follows David’s life, thoughtfully focusing on the ways in which his perilous circumstances expedited his maturation from cheerful youth to wise adolescent. In advance of yet another move, he learns he will never again see a childhood friend, a moment that inspires a revelation: “He understood that nothing in this world is permanent.” David eventually discovers his father is really an anti-Communist, and learns about the cruel dysfunction of Soviet authoritarianism and socialism. The author’s knowledge of the period is remarkable, and he furnishes an unvarnished vision of the time’s rampant anti-Semitism. Further, Tsesis sharply parses the elitist hypocrisy that undergirded the Soviet Union’s propaganda about egalitarian sacrifice—while so much of the country starved, a small ruling portion lived like robber barons. But the narrative, after a dramatically thrilling beginning, becomes a meandering series of impressionistic anecdotes, many of them anticlimactically quotidian. In addition, the manuscript is in need of a through edit (“When they ran out on the balcony of their apartment, they saw a red haze on horizon from the unrelenting blasts and fires produced by German airplanes”). 

A historically authentic but fictionally unfocused Soviet story.