I’m grateful for the sharp-eyed friends who read the original manuscript and gave fabulous advice: Alexis Calice, Aoife Naughton, and Laura Starecheski. Thanks to my dad, Jacob Krasikov, for his merciless cuts, and to my sister, Tatiana, my anchor. To the friends who have become my extended family over years of writing: Natasha Iyerusalimskaya and Olga and Anya Ponorovsky. To my friends and guides in Moscow: Olga Ladygina, Olga Osnovskaja, Sergey Zhuravlev, and Tatiana Smirnova. I am indebted to the Rohr Family Foundation for the priceless gift of time and to Carolyn Hessel for her enthusiastic support of this work as it evolved from talk to prose. Thanks to my editor, Cindy Spiegel, to my agent, Richard Abate, and to the early thoughtful readers: Judy Sternlight, Laura Van der Veer, Caitlin McKenna, Louis Pelosi, Jackie Stapleton, Lynn Lovett, Michael Meyer, Walter and Betty Grey, Carol Christian, Robert Herz, and Rosalind Fink.
I owe a debt of gratitude to the hundreds of papers, interviews, and books that aided my knowledge of the turbulent and tragic Stalinist era and helped me fill the interstices of my characters’ lives. Two volumes were especially helpful in understanding the political context of their plight: Tim Tzouliadis’s excellent The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia and Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, edited by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov.
And finally, my thanks to the guiding spirit of Pauline Friedman, one of the daring women who made the world go round.