The story moves back and forth between Florence’s struggles to adapt to her new life in the 1930s to her son Julian, who, in 2008, is helping his American firm in negotiations with a recently privatised, formerly State-owned petrochemicals conglomerate.

Before long, she has set up home with Leon Brink, another American who has found work with Tass, the official news agency for whom he is a reporter. After a false start at Magnitigrosk, she repairs to Moscow where she meets several fellow American expats. Life in soviet Russia is not the idyll she had anticipated, but she manages to forge a life, working with Russians. Her family are appalled at her decision but are unable to dissuade her. Her experiences there, and a burgeoning friendship with one of the Russian delegates, lead her to decide to emigrate to the Soviet Union. Sana Krasikov’s engrossing novel spans nearly eighty years, and follows three generations of the Fein and Brink familiesIn the early 1930s, left-leaning idealist Florence Fein, already disillusioned with life in Brooklyn following the Depression, witnesses the appalling poverty and casual racism (and specifically antisemitism) while working in Ohio as liaison and interpreter for a Soviet trade agency that is trying to purchase specialist mill components. The novel alternates between her story the story of her son Julian, from his time in the orphanage to his emigration to the States with his family as a Refusenik and his eventual return to Moscow as an oil executive to investigate his mother's past and the story of Julian's son Lenny, an American entrepreneur who is excited about the financial opportunities to be found in the new Russian marketplace. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. A debut novel by acclaimed story writer Sana Krasikov that examines the effects of the Cold War on three generations of one Jewish American family, from the 1930s to the present.įlorence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, to a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class.

The patriots a novel by sana krasikov