a memoir
An insightful memoir delving deeply into the modern Russian immigrant experience.
A violent crime shattered Moscow native Anya Gillinson’s world when she was thirteen years old, urging her family to leave Russia for the American dream. As a teenager raised in a deeply patriarchal Russian society, Anya found herself grappling with a fiercely independent America. Her candid and heartfelt memoir delves into the clash between these two cultures through the stories of her family. It explores how her upbringing in Russia, and the subsequent immigrant experience, shaped her sense of femininity - a concept with vastly different definitions on either side of the Atlantic. Dreaming in Russian pits the two competing identities of her immigrant self against one another. After over thirty years of living in America, in the grip of its indefatigable modernism, Gillinson has come to understand that her bones, brains, and womanhood remain deeply rooted in the soil of Russian patriarchy.
Anya’s journey forces questions, yet in the end it leaves her without answers, but at least with a personal resolution - that three decades of living in America have brought her back to her Russian past, which forever predetermined her present and outlined her future.
Praise for Dreaming in Russian
“It’s a long or short way of saying that in falling in love for the second, or realistically first time, Gillinson arguably discovered the American woman residing within her all along. Read this spectacular book to see if you agree.”
— Forbes
“Anya Gillinson’s deeply personal take on the Russian character and the nature of the Russian state is both surprising and unusual: devoid of tiresome ideological fervor or overwrought historicism. Rather, it is one woman’s remarkable story of recovering her Russian roots as an émigré in post-modern 21st century America.”
— Carl Bernstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of All the President’s Men and author of Chasing History and A Woman in Charge
“A moving tale of growing up in Moscow as the beloved child of a prominent doctor favored by the elite. Gillinson tells the story of being forced to leave her comfortable home and emigrate to the U.S. after his unexpected death, starting life over again as a Jewish émigré. Beautifully written. Compelling reading.”
— Lally Graham Weymouth, journalist, and senior associate editor of The Washington Post
“Anya Gillinson is a woman of great intellect, tremendous passion, and exciting contradictions. Her perspective on her life, through both an American and Russian lens, makes her book unique in many ways. In fact, if there was a word to describe Anya, it is unique.”
— Alec Baldwin
Anya Gillinson
Anya Gillinson was born in Moscow, Russia, into the family of a renowned physician and a concert pianist. When she was thirteen years old, her father was killed during a botched robbery on his first and last visit to New York. Two years after his death, Anya moved to New York with her mother and younger sister and went on to graduate from high school, college, and eventually law school. She considers it a privilege to practice law and to be able to be useful to people, but literature has always been her true calling. In 2015, she published a volume of poetry in Russian, Suppress in Me the Strive To Love. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.
Contact
for publicity inquiries:
Janet Shapiro
Smith Publicity
janet@smithpublicity.com
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