Daniel Gamburg has narrated 6 audiobooks on Listento.it by 6 authors, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir.
A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir
Summary
A compelling story of two intertwined journeys: a Jewish refugee family fleeing persecution and a young man seeking to reclaim a shattered past. In the twilight of the Cold War, nine-year-old Lev Golinkin and his family cross the Soviet border with only ten suitcases, $600, and the vague promise of help awaiting in Vienna. Years later, Lev, now an American adult, sets out to retrace his family's long trek, locate the strangers who fought for his freedom, and in the process, gain a future by understanding his past. Lev Golinkin's memoir is the vivid, darkly comic, and poignant story of a young boy in the confusing and often chilling final decade of the Soviet Union. It's also the story of Lev Golinkin, the American man who finally confronts his buried past by returning to Austria and Eastern Europe to track down the strangers who made his escape possible…. and thank them. Written with biting, acerbic wit and emotional honesty in the vein of Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Bezmozgis, Golinkin's search for personal identity set against the relentless currents of history is more than a memoir: it's a portrait of a lost era. This is a thrilling tale of escape and survival, a deeply personal look at the life of a Jewish child caught in the last gasp of the Soviet Union, and a provocative investigation into the power of hatred and the search for belonging. Lev Golinkin achieves an amazing feat - and it marks the debut of a fiercely intelligent, defiant, and unforgettable new voice.
©2014 Lev Golinkin (P)2014 Blackstone Audio
The Year of the Comet
Summary
An idyllic childhood takes a sinister turn. Rumors of a serial killer haunt the neighborhood, families pack up and leave town without a word of warning, and the country begins to unravel. Policemen stand by as protesters overtake the streets, knowing that the once awe-inspiring symbols of power they wear on their helmets have become devoid of meaning. Lebedev depicts a vast empire coming apart at the seams, transforming a very public moment into something tender and personal, and writes with stunning beauty and shattering insight about childhood and the growing consciousness of a boy in the world.
©2014 Sergei Lebedev. Translation copyright 2017 by Antonina W. Bouis (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Communist Daze
Summary
Welcome to Gradieshti, a Soviet village awash in gray buildings and ramshackle fences, a home to a large, collective farm and to the most oddball and endearing cast of characters possible. For three years in the 1960s, Vladimir Tsesis - inestimable Soviet doctor and irrepressible jester - was stationed in a village where racing tractor drivers tossed vodka bottles to each other for sport; where farmers and townspeople secretly mocked and tried to endure the Communist way of life; where milk for children, running water, and adequate electricity were rare; where the world's smallest motley parade became the country's longest; and where one compulsively amorous Communist Party leader met a memorable, chilling fate. From a frantic pursuit of calcium-deprived, lunatic Socialist chickens to a father begging Soviet officials on his knees to obtain antibiotics for his dying child, Vladimir's tales of Gradieshti are unforgettable. Sometimes hysterical, often moving, always a remarkable and highly entertaining insider's look at rural life under the old Soviet regime, they are a sobering exposé of the terrible inadequacies of its much-lauded socialist medical system.
©2017 Vladimir A. Tsesis (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories
Summary
The first English-language collection of a contemporary Russian master of the short story, who has been profiled in The New Yorker Maxim Osipov, who lives and practices medicine in a town 90 miles outside Moscow, is one of Russia’s best contemporary writers. In the tradition of Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, he draws on his experiences in medicine to write stories of great subtlety and striking insight. Osipov’s fiction presents a nuanced, collage-like portrait of life in provincial Russia - its tragedies, frustrations, and moments of humble beauty and inspiration. The 12 stories in this volume depict doctors, actors, screenwriters, teachers, entrepreneurs, local political bosses, and common criminals whose paths intersect in unpredictable yet entirely natural ways: in sickrooms, classrooms, administrative offices, and on trains and in planes. Their encounters lead to disasters, major and minor epiphanies, and - on occasion - the promise of redemption.
©2019 Original Russian texts © 2019 by Maxim Osipov. English translations © 2019 by Boris Dralyuk except: “The Cry of the Domestic Fowl,” “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” “Polish Friend,” “The Mill,” “On the Banks of the Spree” © 2019 by Alex Fleming; “Moscow-Petrozavodsk,” “The Waves of the Sea” © 2019 by Anne Marie Jackson; “After Eternity” © 2019 by Boris Dralyuk and Anne Marie Jackson. Preface © 2019 by Svetlana Alexievich. All rights reserved (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing
Oblivion
Summary
This masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to examine a very troubled Russia. In one of the first 21st-century Russian novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison-camp system, a young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbor who saved his life and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds, among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags, is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where man and machine worked in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today's Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to rescue history from the brink of oblivion.
©2016 Sergei Lebedev (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Body Outside the Kremlin
Summary
Solovetsky occupies the island site of a former monastery in the White Sea. Here, hundreds of miles from civilization, and with a skeleton crew of secret-policemen in charge, some prisoners are consigned to all kinds of forced labor and others sit at comfortable desks in administrative or cultural positions. With the brutal winter fast approaching, Tolya Bogomolov, a young mathematician serving a three-year sentence, hopes an acquaintance he’s been cultivating will lead to a less brutal work assignment, maybe even a little more bread in his ration. Knowing Gennady Antonov, who holds a privileged position restoring the monks’ seized collection of icons, ought to improve Tolya’s odds of reassignment. But when Antonov’s body is discovered floating frozen in the bay, their connection turns dangerous. At first the authorities question Tolya, but then he’s mystified when they assign him to assist the elderly detective investigating the case - but better to find the real killer than have the murder pinned on him. Digging into Antonov’s secrets turns up strange expropriations of the museum’s icons, rumors of an escape conspiracy among White Army officers, and an illicit affair with a female prisoner who won’t tell all she knows. To avoid becoming the murderer’s next victim, Tolya must defy Solovetsky’s unforgiving regime and make ruthless use of his fellow prisoners. Putting his story to paper at last means reckoning the true cost of his survival.
©2020 James L. May (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing