Kirjahaku

One year going on two⎯the degradation of America under Trump. Many have poured scorn upon him. (Some⎯30% or so of the public as of this writing⎯actually like him.) But none have done so as authoritatively and with such biting satiric flair all day long since his nomination as Mikhail Iossel, who views US (and sometimes Russian) politics through the lens of his upbringing and opposition-steeped young adulthood in the totalitarian world of the Soviet Union.Iossel⎯whose Facebook page has long been a magnet for some 12,000 shocked citizens of the US and the world, and who thought he'd left rule by morons and thugs behind on arriving in his new country, the USA, in 1986⎯does not hold back. His unforgettable, piercing, utterly satisfying posts on Trump's America, Putin's Russia, and the disquieting ties between the two have brought many solace in these troubled times.Notes from Cyberground brings together a choice selection of the best of those posts, some of which have appeared at NewYorker.com. Each chapter covers a month in the period from the November 2016 election to spring 2018.

Comedy and tragedy collide in stories of family life in Soviet Russia and the complexities of the immigrant experience“We can’t stop turning the pages of this book.” —Ilya Kaminsky, New York Times Book ReviewFrom the moment of its founding, the USSR was reviled and admired, demonized and idealized. Many Jews saw the new society ushered in by the Russian Revolution as their salvation from shtetl life with its deprivations and deadly pogroms. But Soviet Russia was rife with antisemitism, and a Jewish boy growing up in Leningrad learned early, harsh, and enduring lessons.Unsparing and poignant, Mikhail Iossel’s twenty stories of Soviet childhood and adulthood, dissidence and subsequent immigration, are filled with wit and humor even as they describe the daily absurdities of a fickle and often perilous reality.