Kosta (excerpt)

Marian Thurm

Of the old days, Kosta remembered absolutely nothing, and why would he? He was, he explained to Rachel, a mere infant at the time his parents had been wrenched away from him in the middle of the night and then, horrifyingly, executed only hours later. Shot to death by Stalin’s thugs in a prison courtyard in Leningrad. For no good reason at all except that they were a couple of Jewish doctors—his mother, an obstetrician, his father a surgeon—two well-educated professionals whom the madman Stalin feared and hated, though of course he’d never even laid eyes upon them. “Nice, huh?” Kosta said.