Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution

by Rand Charles

Overview

Soviet Daughter provides a window into the life of a rebellious, independent woman coming of age in the USSR, and the impact of her story and her spirit on her American great-granddaughter.

This is the story of Julia Alekseyeva and her great-grandmother Lola, two extraordinary women swept up in the history of their tumultuous times. Born in 1910 to a poor, Jewish family outside of Kiev, Lola lived through the Bolshevik revolution, a horrifying civil war, Stalinist purges, and the Holocaust. She taught herself to read, and supported her extended family working as a secretary for the notorious NKVD (which became the KGB), a lieutenant for the Red Army, and later as a refugee in the United States. Interwoven with Lola's history we find Julia's own struggles of coming of age in an immigrant family in Chicago and her political awakening in the midst of the radical politics of the turn of the millenium.

At times heartbreaking and at times funny, this graphic novel memoir unites two generations of strong, independent women against a sweeping backdrop of the history of the USSR.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781621069690
Publisher:	Microcosm Publishing
Publication date:	01/10/2017
Series:	Comix Journalism Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	437,429
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Born in the former USSR and raised a proud citizen of Chicago, Julia Alekseyeva is an author-illustrator as well as an academic. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard, specializing in the avant-garde and film practices in France, Japan, and the former USSR.

Julia has received press from publications such as Reuters, The New York Times, and Bloomberg Business for illustrating the first graphic novel legal brief, submitted as an amicus brief in U.S.A. vs. Apple. She has lived in Kiev, Chicago, New York City, Paris, Cambridge, Kanazawa, and Yokohama, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her partner.

Editorial Reviews

11/21/2016
In this debut graphic memoir, Alekseyeva presents a history of strong women finding their way in hostile systems. Alekseyeva feels isolated after moving to America as a child in 1992, but she finds a kindred spirit in her great-grandmother Lola, a tough-spirited Ukrainian Jew who cut her own trail in a patriarchal, anti-Semitic Soviet Union. The bulk of the memoir is Lola’s incredible tale of pluck, joy, and hard-fought survival, graduating from factory work to a position at the exalted and feared Stalinist secret police, the NKVD. Lola faces brutality, near starvation, and the death of most of her family, but she keeps the spark of idealism and romance alive in her independent-minded flings and bookworm ways. Alekseyeva’s “Interludes,” in which she traces her own evolution as a millennial dreamer and activist, make for interesting bookends but strain too hard to tie her own experiences to Lola’s. A panoramic personal history with fantastic raw material that suffers from some inexpertly drawn art and poor lettering. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly