"On February 21, 1991, twenty-nine-year-old Yelena Khanga, born and raised in Moscow, bent down and grasped a handful of rich, cotton-growing delta soil in Yazoo County, Mississippi. A century ago, this piece of earth had belonged to her great-grandfather, Hilliard Golden, a former slave who became the largest black landowner in Yazoo after the Civil War." "On Thanksgiving Day of that year, at the Long Island home of her cousin Albert Bialek, Yelena, also the great-granddaughter of a Warsaw rabbi, reclaimed another piece of her past. Members of Yelena's other American family raised their glasses in a salute to Yelena and her mother, "who have brought beauty, spice, and a new color into our lives."" "Soul to Soul is a four-generation family story that unfolds across 125 years and three continents - from nineteenth-century Mississippi cotton fields to immigrant Jewish New York and Harlem in the 1920s; from a Soviet Union crushed by Stalin's dictatorship to today's emerging, hoped-for democratic Russia; from Los Angeles to London to the birthplace of Yelena's father, the island of Zanzibar." "This is also a great love story, and a story of rejection. Bertha Bialek, the author's grandmother, entered America through Ellis Island in 1920. In a New York jailhouse, after a union demonstration, she met Oliver Golden, an agronomist and former student of George Washington Carver. When the two fell in love and decided to marry, most of Bertha's family disowned her for loving a black man." "The couple soon realized that their love could not be accepted in the United States. Disillusioned also by American racial prejudices and fired by political idealism, Oliver Golden led a group of black agricultural specialists to the USSR, to help build a socialist future. There in Uzbekistan, in the central Asian city of Tashkent, Yelena Khanga's mother, Lily, was born, to live a Russian life." "When Oliver died at the age of 53, Bertha was left to raise her daughter alone in a country where the government promoted suspicion of all foreigners. Still, Lily grew up to become an historian of African culture. In Moscow, she married Abdullah Khanga, the Zanzibari independence leader who, just two years after the birth of their daughter Yelena, was murdered by his political opponents in Zanzibar." "Yelena Khanga tells of growing up as a black Russian in a white world. There were in fact two Yelenas - a Russian filled with the poetry of Pushkin and the music of Tchaikovsky, and a black, with American accents, who loved the rhythms of Billie Holliday and Duke Ellington. At night, Yelena's grandmother Bialek sang her to sleep with a Yiddish lullaby. In these cultural crosscurrents, her mother struggled to raise her child as an independent thinker in a conformist society." "During the past five years, the political earthquake in Russia has made it possible, at last, to speak dusha v dushu - "soul to soul" - and has made possible this compelling tale of a unique family's roots. From Mississippi to Moscow, Yelena Khanga reveals not only the old hostilities but also a new reconciliation and hope."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved