Oranges for the son of Alexander Levy

"Nella Bielski's fiction is a feminine meditation on death and absence: the absence of the heroine's husband Paul, of the intense life of her childhood in wartime Russia and her youth in Moscow, of friends and family who have vanished behind the tundra of the Gulag, of her parents who loved her." "Yet running like a powerful current throughout is the energy of life itself, precious in the details of its very everydayness: the kitchens in which one sits with friends over a cup of tea, the gestures for practical tasks transmitted from generation to generation. Politics are a part of this life, shaping it without ever occupying its centre, like Alexander Levy whose crime it was to invent a simple dream of a tolerable existence."--BOOK JACKET.