The Red Daughter

March 25, 2019
In this gripping historical about the defection of Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, Schwartz (The Commoner) explores the wider political context that sharpens private tragedy. In 1967, the author’s father, lawyer Alan U. Schwartz, accompanied Alliluyeva from Switzerland to the U.S., setting off a firestorm of media attention and controversy. Told via Svetlana’s fictionalized journals, the story follows Svetlana, who, at age 41, abruptly abandons her homeland for the U.S., leaving her two children behind in hope that they can have a fresh start under a new identity. While attempting to hide her past from those she meets in the U.S., Svetlana also longs for connection. But after a short time working in Princeton, N.J., where she writes and gives lectures, she impulsively accepts an invitation to the cultlike fellowship run by Franklin Lloyd Wright’s widow at Taliesin West in Arizona. While Alliluyeva gains lovers, friends, and has another child, she never fills the void created when she left Russsia and her family behind. With CIA minders never far, the fraught political relationship between Alliluyeva and the U.S. government provides another layer of intrigue. But this lovely novel’s strength is the aching portrait of Svetlana: “not American, not Russian, neither this thing or that thing but always now between these things, which is the tragedy of my life.” Filled with historical details that enliven and ground the fictionalized elements, Schwartz’s elegant novel captures the emotion and strain of Alliluyeva’s second life in the U.S..

April 1, 2019
Fact and fiction mingle seamlessly in a story of the defection and lonely wanderings of Josef Stalin's only daughter. Our travels with Svetlana Alliluyeva (she took her mother's last name, then later reinvented herself as Lana Peters when she married for the second time) begin with her arrival in New York City after having defected from the Soviet Union in 1967. She is met by crowds of curious photographers and wary State Department officials. From here, real-life events blend with Schwartz's (Northwest Corner, 2011, etc.) imagining of her haunted inner life. Holding these two threads together is the character of Svetlana's attorney, Peter Horvath, based in part on the author's father, who was actually sent by the CIA to smuggle Alliluyeva into the United States. In the richly detailed pages of these fictional journals, Svetlana recalls her dark girlhood in Russia grieving her mother's suicide and fearing her father's brutal power. As a young woman, she sees lovers sent to work camps or exiled by her disapproving father and the Soviet government. Unable to be seen as an individual apart from her parentage and fearing the same fate for her two grown children, she defects to the U.S. to start over on her own terms, convincing herself it's the only way they can all break free. But things don't go according to plan, and Svetlana's life becomes a series of stranger-than-fiction twists and turns that take her all over the world in search of her elusive and authentic self. An insightful and compelling saga of a woman desperately trying to escape her infamous past.

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March 1, 2019
As in The Commoner (2008), modeled on Japan's empress, Schwartz again demonstrates his adroitness at illustrating the troubled lives of high-profile twentieth-century women. His new subject is Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter, whose defection to the U.S. in 1967 drew international attention and furor. Schwartz has a personal connection, since his lawyer father brought Alliluyeva to America under CIA cover, but his personality and role have been fictionalized. In Schwartz's variation, in private journals left to her former lawyer, Peter Horvath, Svetlana details her itinerant life, attempts to become Americanized, and feels guilt over abandoning her adult children, whom she had hoped to liberate from her past. An unlikely correspondence leads her to an Arizona-based group of Frank Lloyd Wright acolytes whose repressive commune, ruled by Wright's widow, feels very Russian. Strong-willed and needy, Svetlana grows close to Peter, straining his relationship with his wife. What she doesn't reveal is also illuminating; we learn almost nothing of her earlier marriages. A perceptive exploration of identity, motherhood, and how one woman valiantly tried to shed the heavy mantle of her father's infamous legacy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2018

When she defected, Joseph Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Allilyueva, was escorted by a young lawyer named Paul Horvath whom the CIA had furnished. She stumbled through the unfamiliar thickets of American life, married badly, then turned to Paul for support, with the CIA surveilling their growing intimacy. Schwartz's father was in fact that lawyer, and Schwartz (Reservation Road) combines his own research with his father's reminiscences to craft a fictional account of Allilyueva's struggle to become American.

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