David Bezmozgis

Escaping his political opponents in a Crimean resort town, disgraced Israeli politician Baruch Kotler runs into a former friend who had him sent to the gulag forty years prior and must reconcile with his betrayer and his own poor choices.

"Natasha is the chronicle of the Bermans, told in stories. In "Tapka," six-year-old Mark's first experiments in English bring ruin and near tragedy to the neighbors upstairs. In "Roman Berman, Massage Therapist," Roman and Bella stake all their hopes for Roman's business on their first dinner with a North American family. In the title story, we witness Mark's sexual awakening at the hands of his fourteen-year-old cousin, a new immigrant from the New Russia. In "Minyan," Mark and his grandfather watch as the death of an Odessan cabdriver sets off a religious controversy among the residents of a Jewish old-people's home." "The stories in Natasha capture the immigrant experience."--BOOK JACKET.

"A history of the thinkers, writers, and artists who shaped intellectual culture in Cold War Europe and America"-- Menand analyzes the economic, demographic, and technological forces that drove social and cultural change in US during the twenty years following the end of the Second World War. Introducing us to the personalities at the center of this transformation-- artists and thinkers both in the US and abroad-- he shows how they exerted a powerful influence on postwar art and thought. It was an exciting period of creative innovation and intellectual debate, and it gave birth to the United States we know today. -- adapted from jacket