Records on Bone

“Records on Bone” describes a daughter’s journey to understand the challenges that she and her parents faced while struggling to assimilate into American culture as Soviet-Jewish refugees in the Cold War. Using fragments of remembered stories to reconstruct her father’s childhood in Soviet-Ukraine, and her father’s rekindled interest in the iconic Russian folk singer Vladimir Vysotsky, the author explores the themes of soviet oppression, poverty, the American Dream, and the unrelenting demands of a dominant culture on immigrant families.