A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir

hilarious and heartbreaking

Think about the last time you moved to a different home. Even a modest household has stacks and stacks of boxes.

What do you pack when you are moving your entire family to another country and all you can take with you is ten suitcases, $600 and one piece of jewelry per person? In A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, Lev Golinkin tells us what his family took when, in the last decade of the Soviet Union, they escaped Jewish oppression in Ukraine (then part of the USSR, not an independent nation).

When I first picked this book off the shelf, I supposed it must be a tale of some Westerner’s journey on the Siberian railroad where sometimes you have to get off the train just to sober up for a couple of days. I was wrong. This is much more exciting.

Golinkin tells this tale of escape and survival with wit and insight. As an adult he looks back on the skinny Jewish child whose mother let him stay home and play sick— even though his family was completely secular, he would get beat up for being a Jew every day that he went to school. He relates how his father had to secretly take flour to the Jewish baker to have matzah made when he calculated the approximate time of Passover. When Dad brought the matzah home, Lev had to eat some, even though his father could not explain why they did it. That was the sum of their seder.

After completing his education in the US, Lev goes back and finds some of the people who helped his family, giving him insight into things he didn’t completely understand as the boy who left the USSR with his parents and grandmother. Get A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka (#commissionearned), a wonderful memoir of escape from oppression in living Jewish memory.