Dreaming in Russian
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.
Why I Wrote the Book
I wrote the book to bring the voices of those in my family who are long gone back into this life. Their lives were too big, too important, and too short to disappear into the vacuum of eternity without a trace.
I wrote this book because I wanted to hear my father’s voice speak through me once more.
Finally, I wrote this book to share my perspective on issues such as femininity versus feminism, the roles of men and women in society, and the challenges of navigating these roles in a society that often diverges from my patriarchal upbringing. So much in this book revolves around the complexities of the immigrant experience, its unforgiving nature. The story delves into grief, loss, infidelity, personal betrayal, and death. My Jewish identity, examined against the backdrop of Russian/Soviet antisemitism, is a constant presence throughout the narrative, essential to its fabric.
Praise for Dreaming in Russian
“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
“What a fascinating and compelling book. Anya has poignantly preserved an intimate view of a world very few have seen or experienced, and she tells her story with humor, grace and honesty. Her story becomes our story. Somewhere, her Russian family ancestors are smiling.”
— Michael Feinstein
“Anya Gillinson has written a deeply moving, brutally honest, and utterly majestic account of her life as a Soviet Jew who finds a new birth of Jewish identity and freedom in the United States. From a privileged incarceration in Soviet Russia to the highest heights of social status in New York City, as an accomplished attorney and wife to the head of one of the world’s most celebrated music institutions, Anya’s story of triumph and tragedy, love and loss, and hope and longing is uniquely suited to our turbulent and confusing times. Like light from the darkness, Anya’s story of overcoming the tragic murder of her renowned father to rebuild a life of fortitude and conviction will inspire all those who have grappled with unspeakable loss. As antisemitism rears its reptilian head in the United States and abroad, Anya’s moral courage and ferocious pride as a Jew who revolves in the grandest echelons of American society will inspire people of every ethnicity to embrace their heritage, as we all seek to finally realize the as yet unfulfilled American dream of being ‘one indivisible nation under God.‘“
— Shmuley Boteach, “America’s Rabbi,” international bestselling author of Judaism for Everyone and The Israel Warrior
“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
“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
“This book is both very sincere and very informative, a deeply personal story and a detailed testimony. The state in which both the author of the book and I grew up ceased to exist more than three decades ago, but in our troubled times this memoir is truly important for the new generations of English-speaking readers, because it serves as a vivid reminder of what can happen when people abandon the ideals of freedom and democracy.”
— Evgeny Kissin, pianist and composer