My Life in Stalinist Russia An American Woman Looks Back [Paperback]

A sometimes astonishing, worms-eye view of life under totalitarianism, and a valuable contribution to Soviet and Jewish studies. Kirkus Reviews

In 1931, Mary M. Leder, an American teenager, was attending high school in Santa Monica, California. By years end, she was living in a Moscow commune and working in a factory, thousands of miles from her family, with whom she had emigrated to Birobidzhan, the area designated by the USSR as a Jewish socialist homeland. Although her parents soon returned to America, Mary was not permitted to leave and would spend the next 34 years in the Soviet Union. Readers will be drawn into this personal account of the life of an independent-minded young woman, coming of age in a society that she believed was on the verge of achieving justice for all but which ultimately led her to disappointment and disillusionment. Leders absorbing memoir presents a microcosm of Soviet history and an extraordinary window into everyday life and culture in the Stalin era.

Mary M. Leder has lived in New York since her return from the Soviet Union in 1965.

Laurie Bernstein is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, Camden, and author of Sonias Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia.

Robert Weinberg is Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College. He is author of The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps and Stalins Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and The Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland.

Mary Mackler Leder was by no means a significant figure in Stalinist Russia, but readers will find that she writes an arresting observer's account of life in Russia over more than two decades. Sovietologists of the Stalinist era will find interesting anecdotes about Soviet life that confirm, revise, and in some cases authenticate the constructed sociology of the time. One example that constantly reappears is Leder's insistence on stating that she is an American, while the authorities ló9