By Neal Pollack
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The first seven pages of his book cover his family’s growing fears about Stalinist purges, but they escaped from Ukraine in 1928 by simply applying for a visa to Mexico. Once there he spent two years as a leather worker and as a member of the Confederacion Regional Obrera Mexicana, a major Mexican labor union. Then his family moved to Juarez, where he became a shoe-leather salesman, sang Russian folk songs for a weekly radio program in El Paso, Texas, and learned how to repair radios through a correspondence course. This narrative is broken up by a three-page history of radio and a brief mention of his brother-in-law’s disappearance while seeking work in the Chihuahuan coal mines.
On page 40 Gursky reveals that his mother was raped by Bolsheviks, and that the man he’s referred to as his father up to this point, Gnat Gursky, is not. “I respected him mostly because I feared him,” he writes. “He had hit me and his hands were like hammers. He never gave me a penny and never took me to the movies or for a friendly walk–though I called him Father my whole life, he never had a kind word for me.” Gnat’s plot to murder Gursky is then described for about a page, though Gnat’s motive isn’t at all clear.
Not having much to do after he retired 25 years later, he started his autobiography, writing longhand on a yellow pad. “Everything came to my head, from when I was a little boy up. It was so clear. I started writing. And it came out perfect.”
