Red Crosses
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Sasha Filipenko traces the arc of Russian history from Stalin’s terror to the present day, in a novel full of heart and humanity.
One struggles not to forget, while the other would like nothing better. Tatiana Alexeyevna is an old woman, over ninety, rich in lived experience, and suffering from Alzheimer’s. Every day, she loses a few more of her irreplaceable memories. Alexander is a young man whose life has been brutally torn in two.
Tatiana tells her young neighbor her life story, a story that encompasses the entire Russian 20th century with all its horrors and hard-won humanity. Little by little, the old woman and the young man forge an unlikely friendship and make a pact against forgetting.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Belarusian author Filipenko lays bare the recent history of a ruthless Russian state with the story of an unlikely friendship between a young widower and a survivor of Stalin's gulag. In 2001, having just moved to Minsk, a grieving Sasha finds his apartment door marked with a red cross. It's "here to help me find my way back home," declares his neighbor, Tatyana Alexeyevna, who has Alzheimer's. Tatyana wastes no time befriending Sasha and recounts the story of her life. Born in London in 1910 and educated abroad, she moved to Russia in 1919 with her Russian father, and married an architect in 1934 and had a daughter, before her husband became a POW during WWII. As punishment for being the wife of a traitor—for no true Soviet patriot would allow himself to be caught—Tatyana was arrested. After rape, torture, and a decade in the gulag, she was released, but her husband and daughter had long since disappeared. The narration and dialogue are often comically absurd: "God's afraid of me. I have too many inconvenient questions for him," Tatyana declares. This author brings freshness and wit to a familiar story of Soviet tragedy.
