A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka

July 21, 2014
In late 1989, an 11-year-old Golinkin and his family joined the Jewish diaspora from what would soon be the former Soviet Union. Despite having little connection to their Jewish heritage, the Golinkins had been harassed, bullied, and seen their prospects blocked due to their ethnicity. Their exile brought them first to Austria, where they developed an important friendship with a local baron whose father was an unrepentant Nazi. Soon after, they received asylum in the college town of West Lafayette, Ind. Decades later, Golinkin retraced his journey and interviewed the people who had made his escape possible. Golinkin convincingly portrays the miseries, and rare joys, of his bullied, furtive childhood, and the limits it put on him. As he takes on an American identity, he rejects every aspect of his previous life, from its language to a faith he barely knew, a rejection that includes his choice of colleges (he attended the Roman Catholic Boston College).Trauma and his attempts to deal with it give substance to his book, although Golinkin supplements his memories with interviews and research that add important context. While the narrative grows choppy at the end as it devolves into a series of postscripts, Golinkin has created a deeply moving account of fear and hope.

September 15, 2014
An ex-Iron Curtain refugee-turned-American citizen tells the emotional story of how he and his parents fled the Ukraine two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union.Golinkin was 11 years old when he and his family went into exile. They were among thousands of other Jews seeking political asylum and an end to the anti-Semitism that they and their ancestors before them had been forced to endure. The family was secular; however, that fact did nothing to protect them from harassment and social oppression. The trauma ran so deep that Golinkin developed a severe case of self-hatred that haunted him into adulthood. The family's path away from the Soviet Union took them to Vienna, where two American Jewish aid organizations assisted them and other refugees in beginning the long process toward finding homes in Israel and the West. The family encountered an Austrian baron named Peter. Driven by anguish over his father's Nazi past, Peter helped get Golinkin's father a temporary job to rebuild lost work credentials and prepare him for future gainful employment rather than a life condemned to "delivering pizzas and driving taxis." Eventually, the family settled in West Lafayette, Indiana, where Golinkin's sister was accepted into the Purdue graduate engineering program even though she, like her father, had been stripped of all credentials. Meanwhile, the author rejected every aspect of his former life, including his faith and language, and chose to go to a Roman Catholic college in Boston. Yet ironically, it was in this most un-Jewish of settings where he would begin the process of breaking through years of accumulated anger, pain and rage and accepting himself as a Jew. While the narrative becomes increasingly fractured near the end of the book, Golinkin still manages to impact readers with the force of his unflinching honesty. A mordantly affecting chronicle of a journey to discover that "you can't have a future if you don't have a past."

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October 15, 2014
Golinkin was just a child during the tumultuous years of Soviet premier Gorbachev's introduction of glasnost and perestroika, yet his parents and grandmother remembered the worst of the USSR's restrictive, controlling atmosphere. Worse, the family members were zhid, Jewish. This atmospheric, touching memoir, whose chapters begin with dates and locations to orient the reader, follows the Golinkins as they escape the Soviet Union and land in America. Golinkin's early memories are touchingly true to those of a youngster, and he reports on his family members' fears, troubles, persistence, and patience with a keen eye and a memorable voice. Once in the U.S., ensconced near Purdue Universitythe former-engineer father a clerk, the former-doctor mother a barista, and hopes for his sister's attending Purdue waveringGolinkin muses, Dignity, family, social status, or blood, one way or another, every immigrant pays the admission price to America, and the older they are, the steeper the fare. Years later, Golinkin finds and thanks the many people who helped his family and inspired him to help others as well. Eye-opening for those who come to the U.S. and for those who help them do so.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)