Prologue -- Of Goat Milk and Marble Lions -- Different -- Becoming Refuseniks -- Dunes of Happiness -- Cavalier of the Gold Medal -- Moscow State -- Summertime -- Poetry, Love, Persecution -- Facts and Arguments -- Across the Steppe and into the Black Sea -- Last Autumn -- Readers' Reports -- Purim-shpil -- Family Tree -- Taking Leave -- In America? -- Index of Names and Places
Summary
A memoir of coming of age and struggling to leave the USSR. The author chronicles the triumphs and humiliations of a Soviet childhood and expresses the dreams and fears of a Jewish family that never gave up its hopes for a better life. Narrated in the tradition of Tolstoy's confessional trilogy and Nabokov's autobiography, this is a searing account of the KGB's persecution of refuseniks, a poet's rebellion against totalitarian culture, and Soviet fantasies of the West during the Cold War
