Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Tenderberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

In the course of my reading, I found a recently published book by a writer who frequently appears in the New Yorker,

in New York Magazine, in many of the glossies. He's a wonderful writer. His name is Alex Halberstadt.

He was born in the Soviet Union when it was the Soviet Union, and he's written a cross

between memoir and history called Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, since I am myself of

Russian descent, and I know so little about what it was like to grow up in the Soviet Union,

I found the book fascinating when I learned in its first, oh, ten pages, that Alex Halberstadt's grandfather was one of Stalin's personal

bodyguards, that he, in this book, would travel to the Soviet Union to meet this previously unmet, this grandfather once combed his hair and gave

him a bath. How old were you then? I was three months old, Michael. And you had barely spent time

with your biological father because he stayed in the Soviet Union while you and your mother and your mother's parents came to America.

Yes?

That's right, Michael.

How old were you then?

I was nine years old.

And where did you land?

...