Barry Joseph/Seltzertopia author speaking at Shir Shalom

THE PATRIOTS: An idealistic young American woman heads for the Soviet Union in 1934, with consequences that reverberate through three generations of one Jewish family. An epic that takes us from Stalin’s era to America to the oil-rich world of New Russia.




Imagine a United States post-economic crisis. Economic uncertainty divides us by race and class. A new form of popular media fuels outrage. And the presidency is taken by the wealthy son of a New York family, who promptly develops a surprising friendship with Russia’s strong man leader. 
If you think I’m talking about today…. you’d be off by about 80 years. 
Come hear to the true story behind Sana Krasikov’s latest Novel, The Patriots, about Florence Fein, a young American woman who abandons her middle-class Brooklyn Jewish family and heads to where she thinks the Future is happening. Florence was hardly alone. Thousands of Americans made that “reverse migration”, only to find themselves trapped in Russia for good. Trapped not only by Stalinist schemes, but by America’s own complicated relationship with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Includes the story of the Yiddish Poets who executed the greatest Jewish fundraising campaign you’ve (likely) never heard of. 




Bio: 

Sana Krasikov was born in 1979 in Ukraine and grew up in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and in New York. In 2017 She was named one of Granta\’s Best Young American Novelists. Krasikov’s debut story collection, One More Year, was a finalist for the 2009 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. It received a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award and won the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, among other publications. She lives in Hastings-on-Hudson with her husband, Gregory Warner, a radio journalist, and their two children.