"Living with her Babby after her parents' death, 10-year-old Dinah Ash is invited to train at Leningrad's legendary Vaganova Ballet School. In the world of elite dance, she works hard, falls in love, and weathers the Soviet Union's ubiquitous antisemitism, but despite an impressive talent, she quickly learns that dancers of her "profile" don't make prima ballerinas. Love of Leningrad, ballet, friends, family, and books sustain Dinah until history...

"A thrilling, witty, and slyly original Cold War mystery about a ragtag group of Jewish refuseniks in Moscow. On his wedding day in 1976, Viktor Moroz stumbles upon a murder scene: two gay men, one of them a US official, are axed to death in Moscow. Viktor, a Jewish refusenik, is stuck in Russia due to the government's denial of his application to leave for Israel; he sits "in refusal" alongside his wife and their community of intellectuals, Jewish...

The longest river in Europe, the Volga, divides the continent in two. On one side, mighty mountains, large Russian cities with white stone churches, translucent blue lakes of icy water, a cold wind blowing from the North Sea, and, in the early years of the twentieth century, the winds of momentous change blowing even harder, bringing with them revolution and ideologies that will shape the next two centuries of human history. On the other side, a world...