Synopses & Reviews
In the 1930s, as waves of war and persecution were crashing over Europe, two young Jewish women began separate journeys of survival. One, a Polish-born woman from Bialystok, where virtually the entire Jewish community would soon be sent to the ghetto and from there to Hitler's concentration camps, was determined not only to live but to live with pride and defiance. The other, a Russian-born intellectual and introvert, would eventually become a high-level censor under Stalin's regime. At war's end, both women found themselves in Moscow, where informers lurked on every corner and anti-Semitism reigned. It was there that Ester and Ruzya would first cross paths, there that they became the closest of friends and learned to trust each other with their lives.
In this deeply moving family memoir, journalist Masha Gessen tells the story of her two beloved grandmothers: Ester, the quicksilver rebel who continually battled the forces of tyranny; Ruzya, a single mother who joined the Communist Party under duress and made the compromises the regime exacted of all its citizens. Both lost their first loves in the war. Both suffered unhappy unions. Both were gifted linguists who made their living as translators. And both had children Ester a boy, and Ruzya a girl who would grow up, fall in love, and have two children of their own: Masha and her younger brother.
With grace, candor, and meticulous research, Gessen peels back the layers of secrecy surrounding her grandmothers lives. As she follows them through this remarkable period in history from the Stalin purges to the Holocaust, from the rise of Zionism to the fall of communism she describes how each of her grandmothers, and before them her great-grandfather, tried to navigate a dangerous line between conscience and compromise.
Ester and Ruzya is a spellbinding work of storytelling, filled with political intrigue and passionate emotion, acts of courage and acts of betrayal. At once an intimate family chronicle and a fascinating historical tale, it interweaves the stories of two women with a brilliant vision of Russian history. The result is a memoir that reads like a novel and an extraordinary testament to the bonds of family and the power of hope, love, and endurance.
Review
"Reviewers sometimes call a work of nonfiction 'as exciting as a novel,' but that would be an understatement applied to this extraordinary family memoir....Ester and Ruzya will remind you how much life, history and emotional and moral complexity the genre can convey in the hands of a wonderful writer." Katha Pollitt, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"This astonishing and deeply moving story is related with a masterful eye for the human detail that makes history come alive." Booklist
Review
"Ruzya's granddaughter, Masha Gessen, is back living in Moscow, and has written this poignant account of the lives of her grandmothers, Ruzya and Ester Goldberg." Baltimore Sun
Review
"Gessen offers the reader an extended case study in the moral ambiguity of life in a dictatorship..." Washington Post
Synopsis
To fourteen-year-old Masha Gessen, Ester the rebel and Ruzya the censor were not hostages to history but simply her beloved grandmothers. And when she and her parents emigrated to the United States in 1981, once the Soviet Union began allowing its Jewish citizens to leave, she feared she would never see these women again. Ten years later, however, she was able to return to Moscow, this time as a young journalist on assignment, and Ester and Ruzya were there to meet her at the airport. Over the course of the years that followed, she drew them out about their lives, learning what it meant to have struggled through the cataclysmic upheavals of the war, the Holocaust, and Stalin's terror. Both women lost the men they loved during the war, both were Jews under an oppressive and increasingly anti-Semitic regime, and both had careers that made use of their gifts for foreign languages. But these two close friends make very different choices in response to the intolerable demands of their time.
A moving portrayal of how overwhelming events force people to search for the decent compromise, the right choice when there is no choice at all, this narrative casts a warm human light on a dark and troubled time in history.
About the Author
Masha Gessen was born in the U.S.S.R., emigrated to the United States when she was fourteen years old, and later returned to Russia as a foreign correspondent. She makes her permanent home in Moscow with her partner, Svenya, and their two children but is currently living in Boston, where she has a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard.