Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992 - Hardcover

Khanga, Yelena; Jacoby, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393034046 ISBN 13: 9780393034042

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1994

Synopsis

The granddaughter of two American communists--one black, one white--who settled in the Soviet Union in 1931, retraces her family's history, from a former slave in Mississippi to the rise of a democratic Russia

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

With freelance writer Jacoby, Russian journalist Khanga offers a competent account of an unusual heritage. Her maternal grandparents were American Communists who in 1931 moved from New York City to Soviet Uzbekistan to develop a cotton industry: her grandfather, Oliver Golden, was black and the son of a slave; and her grandmother, Warsaw-born Bertha Bialek Golden, was the Jewish daughter of a Hebrew-school teacher and garment worker. Khanga's mother, Lily Golden, became the first scholar at the African Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which Khrushchev created at the suggestion of Golden family friend W.E.B. Du Bois. Khanga's father, Abdullah, was an African independence leader who treated Lily like a traditional Muslim wife, locking her inside the home when he went out; in 1965 he was assassinated by political opponents in his native Zanzibar. Khanga describes the pitfalls of growing up in white, anti-American Soviet society, her reporting stints at a Moscow News revolutionized by glasnost and her work as an exchange journalist at the Christian Science Monitor in Boston. In America, she travels the country and finds her Bialek and Golden relatives. She is opinionated about American racism and reactions to African Americans, but, given her dual heritage, her treatments of African American anti-Semitism and American Jewry are curiously cursory. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0393034046
• ISBN 13: 9780393034042
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 318