Book Launch: The Patriots by Sana Krasikov

Sana Krasikov’s short story collection, One More Year, drew raves for its exploration of the lives of Russian and Georgian immigrants struggling to make it in the United States. Now, in her meticulously researched debut novel, Krasikov explores the effects of the Cold War on three generations of one Jewish American family, from the 1930s to the present. Inspired by a true story of an American woman who fled to Russia seeking better opportunities than the economically depressed United States of the 1930s could provide, THE PATRIOTS, is a love story, the story of a relationship between mother and son, and that of a woman and her country.

Graduating into the teeth of the Great Depression, Florence Fein will do anything to escape her Brooklyn middle-class values and find work of meaning and consequence. When a new job and a love affair lead her to Moscow, she doesn’t think twice about abandoning America — only to discover, years later, that America has abandoned her.

Now, as her son Julian travels back to Moscow — entrusted to stitch together a murky transcontinental oil deal — he must dig into Florence’s past to discover who his mother really was and what she became. He must also dissuade his own son, Lenny, from pursuing his perilous quest for prosperity in cutthroat New Russia. To do this, Julian has to confront who he is as a father, and who he was as a son.

Through the history of one family moving back and forth between continents over three generations, The Patriots tells story of the entangled relationship between America and Russia, and reveals the extraordinary dialectic dance of two superpowers.