"Your problem is you have a Russian soul," Anna's mother tells her. In 1980, Anna is a naïve UConn senior studying abroad in Moscow at the height of the Cold War-and a second-generation Russian Jew raised on a calamitous family history of abandonment, Czarist-era pogroms, and Soviet-style terror. As Anna dodges date rapists, KGB agents, and smooth-talking black marketeers while navigating an alien culture for the first time, she must come to terms with the aspects of the past that haunt her own life. With its intricate insight into the everyday rhythms of an almost forgotten way of life in Brezhnev's Soviet Union, Forget Russia (Tailwinds Press, 2020) is a disquieting multi-generational epic about coming of age, forgotten history, and the loss of innocence in all of its forms.

L. Bordetsky-Williams (aka Lisa Williams) is the author of Forget Russia, published by Tailwinds Press, December 2020 (https://www.forgetrussia.com). She has also published the memoir, Letters to Virginia Woolf, The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf, and three poetry chapbooks. She is a Professor of Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey and lives in New York City.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, University of Texas at Austin.

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