Just finished my first hardcover book in two years and it feels very good. I bought it on one of my last trips to Moscow and it has waited all that time to be read. It was a good read and I am glad I brought it.

The story is sat up in the years followed the world war two. Although I was born much later but I heard the stories from my grandparents, my parents and my aunt about that time. Actually I experienced the end of the era they were all part of. And this book created such a detailed picture of the time and people who lived back then, that I sometimes felt that I am still a child who is listening the stories told by my relatives.

I hope this book will survive until my son grows up and he will have enough language and love for written word to read it. I am not sure that I could describe everything to him as well as the author did.

Sometimes I wish we could preserve the experiences and stories that are told by people we know in little boxes. And than our children would open them and see what we saw. Our world is changing so much and so fast, that my son will have no idea what I am talking about. And even if we take him back to Russia, it changed so much it won't help. I wish he could meet my aunt, who could easily be one of the characters in this book. Sadly he is too small to appreciate what she has to offer and she is too old to wait.

Many feelings were stirred in me by this book, mostly sad. I guess all of the people who left their country and settled somewhere else have this melancholia from time to time which comes with the territory. A few weeks ago the taxi driver who was Russian and (of course) had a famous psychologist as a friend who told him that immigration is a biggest trauma that one can experience, most people just don't realize it. Looking at the people I know I agree with him. When walking through the city my eye catching the certain people from the crowd and I almost never wrong. Those people have something in their eyes that gives them away.

That wraps up another week. The book by the way is by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, "Sincerely yours, Shurik"