Books like Little Golden America

The poet Langston Hughes’s autobiography engagingly recounts his travels to Cuba, Haiti, Japan, and Spain during the Civil War. The book's centerpiece is his 1931-1932 trip to the Soviet Union. He visited as part of a contingent of twenty-two African Americans hired to make a film on race relations in the United States.

The film project never panned out, but Hughes took advantage of the situation to visit Soviet Central Asia. He understood that his hosts tried too hard to convince American visitors of the progress made under the Soviet regime. But his autobiography also conveys the wonderful strangeness of being in a country officially committed to antiracism, where people of color had opportunities for education and advancement.  

In 1929, George Counts, a professor at Columbia Teachers College who was sympathetic to Soviet experiments in education, bought a new Ford, shipped it to Moscow, and braved 10,000 kilometers of mostly unpaved roads to see the Soviet Union, then undertaking a massive industrialization drive.

I was aware that the Soviet highway system was underdeveloped but was nonetheless shocked to learn details like the fact that the Soviet Union had no gas pumps; Counts poured pails of gas into his car through a funnel. His road trip helped me better understand Americans’ optimism about the Soviet project and Soviet visitors’ love of American technology.

This book allows readers to see the United States through the eyes of six visitors from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. A big part of the collection's appeal is that the authors were not neutral observers but committed socialists. Armed with preconceptions about capitalism, they offer provocative perspectives on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

The book includes work by three authors little-known in English translation (Grigory Machet, Vladimir Korolenko, and Vladimir Bogoraz) and travelogues by three famous writers, the novelist Maxim Gorky, who visited in 1906, and the Soviet poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Esenin, who visited in the 1920s. 

In 1980, the novelist Vassily Aksyonov, whose hipster characters loved rock’n’roll and all things American, fell afoul of the Soviet state; stripped of his Soviet citizenship while in the United States, he decided to stay.

His memoir chronicles his efforts to make sense of a country that often failed to match his idealized preconceptions. Like Ilf and Petrov, whose travelogue was one of his points of reference, Aksyonov undertook a road trip from New York to California and back.

He was sometimes overawed by American technology, critical of American cultural vacuity, and able to laugh at his own disorientation. His first thought when he saw rats in Washington, DC, was that they must be pets, maybe gerbils.    

The follow-up to his acclaimed book What Belongs to You, Cleanness is a relatively short but gorgeously executed novel about an American teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria. It gives snapshots of his relationship, as well as dating app hooks ups – for better or worse. Greenwell is one of the greatest writers of our time, and he turns each sentence beautifully. 

The Schneirs did not write the first book on the famous case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, New Yorkers who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in 1951 and put to death by the U.S. government in 1953. But for 20 years after its publication in 1965, their book became the definitive version of how the Rosenbergs had been victims of a grave miscarriage of justice, convicted of a crime “that never occurred”.

When the Schneirs published a revised version in 1983, its claims directly conflicted with those of another 1983 book, The Rosenberg File by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, which argued that during World War II, Julius Rosenberg had absolutely been a spy who shared atomic secrets with the Soviet Union. These divergent views led to a very public debate over the Rosenbergs’ guilt.

For decades, historians argued over the extent of Communist Party involvement in Soviet Espionage directed at the United States. The opening of the Soviet archives and the release of the VENONA project decodes of communication between the Soviet Consulate in New York and Moscow finally provided a solid answer.

Of the many books written about the subject, I like Sibley’s best. She takes her readers through the facts of the most famous cases and gives equal attention to the points of view of all the main actors. I particularly like her descriptions of early Soviet networks devoted primarily to industrial espionage. 

The Brezhnev era was when the Soviet elite decided not to come to terms with Stalin. This “fictional” memoir by one of Russia’s most interesting living writers is a penetrating meditation on fathers and sons, set against the backdrop of post-War Moscow. Erofeyev senior was Stalin’s official French interpreter, a believer in world revolution, avid tennis player, and tender parent. Erofeyev junior was a literary enfant terrible, who, by helping edit an almanac of underground writing in 1979, ended his father’s diplomatic career. The book is a beautifully crafted window into the personal and political of late communism.

Mary Leder was an American teenager in the 1930s when her Jewish socialist immigrant parents, poverty-stricken by the Great Depression, decided to return to Russia to build a Jewish homeland in Birobidzhan. After a brief period of difficulty, they left the Soviet Union and returned to the United States, but Leder was detained due to passport difficulties.

In this moving memoir, she discusses her life in Moscow as a student, a factory worker, an editor, and a young wife and mother. She provides a tragic and compelling account of the repressions of the 1930s, the chaotic evacuation of Moscow in 1941 as the Germans approached the city, the death of her baby girl in evacuation, and the growing anti-Semitism after the war. At one point she shared a communal apartment with a young, very kind Vietnamese revolutionary who she later learned was Ho Chi Minh. The journey she narrates, from… show more.

Ilf and Petrov were Soviet-era funny men, comedians, and satirists who dared to tell a few truths about the horrors of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. They also wrote a delightful travel book (One Storied America) about the United States in the 1930s.

Lisa Kirschenbaum takes us behind Ilf and Petrov’s 10,000-mile American road trip. Kirschenbaum introduces us to the many people that Ilf and Petrov met in Depression-era America: immigrant workers, famous filmmakers, poets, and revolutionaries, and analyzes their experiences in the country of their dreams.

Kirschenbaum’s insightful observations about the Soviet Union and the United States during this seminal decade are worth considering today.