The book is devoted to the history of two families—Russian and Jewish—and covers the period from the end of the Civil War to the 1970s of the 20th century. The main characters face hunger, repression, the Great Patriotic War, hardships after the war, the Thaw period, the Brezhnev era… This is a historical saga about their everyday life, meetings and partings, endurance and heroism: people never stopped learning how to love and value one another despite the hard trials.
Families so unlike at first glance, with different foundations and traditions, are united by the shared griefs and joys that the same difficult time brings. At the beginning of the book, the heroes don’t know each other, but at the turn of the 1970s their fates intersect…
The reader will find themselves in different times and different places—in the sky and on the ground, in sunny Poltava region and in the trading town of Henichesk, in Kyiv and Kharkiv, in Moscow and Leningrad, in Yaroslavl and Gorky; they will travel across the vastness of Siberia and Central Asia, get to know life in a Moscow communal apartment, rural Ukrainian life, and the work of an intelligence-and-survey party… Many people—both “Reds” and “Whites,” and those neutral—will cross the heroes’ paths and leave an indelible mark on their souls.
The book is written based on real events, and its characters have real historical prototypes.