Lament

Based on remarkable real life events, a modern epic novel follows a young Jewish woman struggling to survive the 20th century's most pitiless decades.

With Lament: A Soviet Woman and Her True Story, author Liz Mackie has crafted a propulsive marvel of narrative immediacy and nearly cinematic effect, drenched in love, tragedy, terror, and pure adventure. You'll taste the exquisite Black Sea romance of Odessa, then travel by Siberian Rail to an impossibly distant Soviet Far East and the doomed "Zion" of the Bolsheviks' Birobidzhan project. At this lush novel's heart lie three years of war-time imprisonment, forced labor, and miraculous survival in the death trap that was Transnistria, Romanian-occupied Ukraine.

Reviewers call Lament "a captivating and truthful story," and "a work of great craft, perceptive about the details of the everyday, the small triumphs of single moments, and the way social relationships frame out society at all levels in ever-shifting arrays of power," "beautifully written," a "must read."

Nostalgistudio's inaugural title is a rich and remarkably timely book about women and family, exile and war, humiliation and prejudice, performance and poetry, and the testing of humanity's spirit by the ultimate challenges. This revised second edition of the 2018 original adds a wide-ranging glossary to guide readers through a world where Russian, Yiddish, Romanian, and Soviet words collide.