Literature, Fiction
ISBN: 9781732848047 (Print)
9781732848054 (eBook)
$14.00 (Print); $9.99 (eBook)
Paperback, eBook

About the Author

L. BORDETSKY-WILLIAMS is the author of the
memoir, Letters to Virginia Woolf (Hamilton Books,
2005); The Artist
as Outside in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia
Woolf (Greenwood Press, 2000); and three poetry chapbooks
(The Eighth Phrase (Porkbelly Press 2014), Sky
Studies (Finishing Line Press 2014), and In the Early
Morning Calling (Finishing Line Press, 2018)). She is a
Professor of Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey and lives in New York City.

Forget Russia

​
L. Bordetsky-Williams

“Your problem is you have a Russian soul,” Anna’s mother tells her. In 1980, Anna is a naïve UConn senior studying abroad in Moscow at the height of the Cold War—and a second-generation Russian Jew raised on a calamitous family history of abandonment, Czarist-era pogroms, and Soviet-style terror. As Anna dodges date rapists, KGB agents, and smooth-talking black marketeers while navigating an alien culture for the first time, she must come to terms with the aspects of the past that haunt her own life. With its intricate insight into the everyday rhythms of an almost forgotten way of life in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, Forget Russia is a disquieting multi-generational epic about coming of age, forgotten history, and the loss of innocence in all of its forms.  

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Advance Acclaim for Forget Russia

“One by one, Anna will lift the tops from the Russian dolls starting from the original tragedy— the murder of her great-grandmother Zlata during a pogrom—to shed light on the destiny of three generations of women . . . In this dazzling choral novel, woven together over almost eighty years, the great-granddaughter triumphs in the challenge to reunite her family forever, calming their hearts beyond the centuries.”
- Maia Brami, author of All Yours 
 
“Bordetsky-Williams has brought to life indelible histories, from the village of Gornostaypol in 1917 revolutionary Russia, to 1930’s Leningrad, to Moscow in 1980.”
- Adrianne Kalfopoulou, author of A History of Too Much  
 
“Deep, moving and elegantly written, the book is a beautiful tribute to the interwovenness of human lives across time, space, generations. Lisa Bordetsky-Williams skillfully lifts the veil on life in the Soviet Union while remaining true to its secrets and mysteries. Its poetic prose and the delicate yet powerful storyline make it a page-turner that will, no doubt, leave no reader untouched.”
- Maarja Kadajane, co-founder of the Constructive Journalism Institute