Soviet Daughter provides a window into the life of a
rebellious, independent woman coming of age in the USSR, and the
impact of her story and her spirit on her American
great-granddaughter, two extraordinary women swept up in the history
of their tumultuous times.
Soviet Daughter
is the story of Julia Alekseyeva's great-grandmother Lola. Born in
1910 to a poor, Jewish family outside of Kiev, Lola lived through the
Bolshevik revolution, a horrifying civil war, Stalinist purges, and
the Holocaust. She taught herself to read, and supported her extended
family working as a secretary for the notorious NKVD (which became
the KGB) and later as a lieutenant for the Red Army. Her family,
including 4-year-old Julia, immigrated to the U.S. as refugees in the
wake of Chernobyl and forged a new life. Interleaved with Lola's
history we find Julia's own struggles of coming of age in an
immigrant family and her political awakening in the midst of the
radical politics of the turn of the millennium.
At times heartbreaking and at times
funny, this graphic novel memoir unites two generations of strong,
independent women against a sweeping backdrop of the history of the
USSR. Like Sarah Glidden in How to Understand Israel in 60
Days or Less, or Marjane Satrapi
in Persepolis,
Alekseyeva deftly combines compelling stories of women finding their
way in the world with an examination of the ties we all have with our
families, ethnicities, and the still-fresh traumas of the 20th
century.