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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
April 2011
On Sale: March 29, 2011
368 pages
ISBN: 0374281408
EAN: 9780374281403
Hardcover
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Fiction
Summer, 1978. Brezhnev sits like a stone in the Kremlin,
Israel and Egypt are inching towards peace, and in the
bustling, polyglot streets of Rome, strange new creatures
have appeared: Soviet Jews who have escaped to freedom
through a crack in the Iron Curtain. Among the thousands who
have landed in Italy to secure visas for new lives in the
West are the members of the Krasnansky family — three
generations of Russian Jews. There is Samuil, an old
Communist and Red Army veteran, who reluctantly leaves the
country to which he has dedicated himself body and soul;
Karl, his elder son, a man eager to embrace the
opportunities emigration affords; Alec, his younger son, a
carefree playboy for whom life has always been a game; and
Polina, Alec's new wife, who has risked the most by breaking
with her old family to join this new one. Together, they
will spend six months in Rome — their way station and
purgatory. They will immerse themselves in the carnival of
emigration, in an Italy rife with love affairs and ruthless
hustles, with dislocation and nostalgia, with the promise
and peril of a new life. Through the unforgettable
Krasnansky family, David Bezmozgis has created an intimate
portrait of a tumultuous era. Written in precise,
musical prose, The Free World is a stunning debut
novel, a heartfelt multigenerational saga of great
historical scope and even greater human debth. Enlarging on
the themes of aspiration and exile that infused his
critically acclaimed first collection, Natasha and Other
Stories, The Free World establishes Bezmozgis as one of
our most mature and accomplished storytellers.
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