Jacob's ladder

Review by Booklist Review

Nora Ossetsky, a set designer in 1970s Moscow, discovers a willow chest filled with her paternal grandparents' correspondence after her Grandmother Marusya's death. Thus begins acclaimed Russian writer Ulitskaya's (The Big Green Tent, 2014) expansive novel about the complications of human lives and repeating generational patterns, set against a backdrop that skips across a century of tumultuous Russian and Soviet history. Nora's and Marusya's parallel stories are intercut, and both depict the challenge of maintaining long-distance relationships. Nora endures separations from her Georgian lover and later from her eccentric son, while Marusya, a dancer from Kiev, and the man she marries, Jacob Ossetsky, lay their hearts and minds bare in passionate letters written while apart. Although the novel's early pages promise the revelation of family secrets, and the narrative delivers, it is primarily concerned with evoking people's quotidian joys and sorrows. The story sojourns through the realms of music, science, and politics as Ulitskaya gives full rein to her characters' thoughts particularly Jacob's, with his great thirst for knowledge but the plot remains strong. Ideal for devotees of Russian literature and epic tales.--Sarah Johnson Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Ulitskaya (The Big Green Tent) travels through a century of tangled Russian family history in this lucid saga. Nora Ossietzky, upon the death of her grandmother, discovers a trunk filled with letters and diaries from the 1900s and 1940s that belonged to her grandfather Jacob. As Nora sifts through these writings, readers travel through some of the most turbulent times in Russian and Ukrainian history: the Jewish pogroms, WWI, prerevolutionary times, the horrific Stalin era, and Jacob's arrests and time in the gulags. Nora unravels these strands of family history while moving through the threads of her own life: her childhood with a remote father, her failed and unconventional marriage, the birth of her son, his later drug addiction, her career and fame in the theatrical world of Moscow, and the birth of her grandchild, Jacob, named after his great-great-grandfather. In the tradition of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Ulitskaya's complicated work covers a century of Russian history, politics, economics, culture, and music, which can be overwhelming. But there is something mesmerizing about the narrative's scale, and patterns emerge: the little control humans have over their lives; the impact of political forces on individuals; the certainty of death, somehow softened by the promise of new birth. This is a challenging yet rewarding epic. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Voices whisper, fearful and secretive, across the generations in Russian novelist Ulitskaya's (The Kukotsky Enigma, 2016, etc.) latest.Nora Ossetsky is a Soviet icon of a kind, a single mother who resolutely raises her child alone while working to advance the cause of the fatherland. But, alas, in those days of Brezhnev and an arteriosclerotic state, she's a bit of a bohemian, involved with a brilliant theater director who has decided that it would be better to wait out the repression back home with his wife in Tbilisi, a defeated retreat from Moscow after a staging of Chekhov is shut down on the eve of its premiere, having enraged "the ministerial special forces, the Party hacks" with its subtly subversive staging. Russian theater lies at the heart of Ulitskaya's richly detailed story, which takes its title, subtly as well, from the musical Fiddler on the Roof, but so too do epic, multigenerational works of fictionfor underlying Nora's story are those of her parents and grandparents, the latter from the revolutionary generation. The patriarch of the family is the watchmaker Pinchas Kerns, who has emigrated from Switzerland in time to watch the first stirrings of the anti-czarist uprisings; largely indifferent to politics"He remained a craftsman all his life, and never quite grasped the finer, or even cruder, points of communism, much less capitalism"Pinchas and his children are nevertheless swept up by events: war, the rise of the Stalinist state, and soon enough the gulag. "Even such a giant among men as Dostoevsky feared the horror of loneliness!" writes Nora's grandfather Jacob, in a diary that tracks the horror not just of loneliness, but of being separated from family and society for the crime of being one whose "thinking was out of step." Life improves for Nora with the end of the USSR, but even in 2011, at the end of the book, when "old age caught up with her," the fear remains.A sweeping, ambitious story reminiscent at times of Pasternak in its grasp of both history and tragedy. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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