Russian Dance

From Manhattan to Moscow, this personal story of love and espionage takes you on a mesmerizing journey through the turbulent years of the early twentieth century.

Advanced Praise for Russian Dance

"It is a rare occasion to have an opportunity–as painful as it is–to look into the USSR’s tragic past via a personal story of two people . . . who were blessed with a real passion and punished for that with a far-too-real betrayal. Have those involved in the deeds of the inhuman state been publicly exposed and condemned? Very few were. A book like this is not just about history–it is a warning for the present and future. Russian Dance is yet to be over."
–Yevgenia M. Albats Fellow, Davis Center for Russian Studies, Harvard University, and author of The State Within a State: The KGB and its Hold on Russia–Past, Present, and Future

"Russian Dance is at once riveting history and finely crafted literature–the tale of a brutally oppressive Russia, a communist-obsessed America, and Jewish survival. Her deft depiction of my outspoken grandfather suggests a larger evenhandedness in her handling of the grand scale of her narrative. Andrée Brooks has given us a brave, important, and irresistible book."
–Hamilton Fish President, Nation Institute, and grandson of Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., chairman of the special congressional committee set up at the close of the 1920s to investigate communist activity inside the United States

"A riveting, disquieting journey to Moscow during the tumultuous political and economic scene of the 1920s and 1930s. The story moves from New York, to Italy, to Moscow as we witness the interplay of intrigue, politics, power, money, and religion. Brooks captures national moods as only a cosmopolitan can."
–Gene Dattel financial historian and former investment banker

"In Russian Dance, Andrée Aelion Brooks immerses the reader in the glittering art and theater life of New York in the 1920s. Brooks renders this world so strikingly, in all its wealth and splendor, that Bluet Rabinoff’s decision to abandon husband and daughter and run off to Stalinist Russia with her lover, Marc, appears all the more shocking by contrast. The music and theater world of the 1920s will never come again, but it is vividly preserved in the pages of Russian Dance."
–Austin Flint playwright and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Writing, Columbia University

Of the many glittering salons of New York in the Jazz Age, none was more prestigious than the one that regularly convened in the Upper West Side home of impresario Max Rabinoff. It was here that celebrities of opera, ballet, politics, and business came together to catch up on the latest high-society gossip, trade quips, and pay homage to their beautiful and vivacious hostess, Helene Rabinoff, known to everyone as Bluet. And it was here that the artistic refugees fleeing the horrors of the Russian Revolution would congregate, no matter which side they supported.

On one evening in 1928, a darkly handsome and charismatic Russian doctor by the name of Marc Cheftel stepped into this salon for the very first time. Close to the leaders of the Revolution, Cheftel had played a key role in its earliest days. Now he had come to New York to solicit medical relief aid for the beleaguered Soviet people through the Russian Red Cross. Or so everyone was told.

Within months of their first meeting Bluet and Marc would become lovers, each finding in the other the fulfillment of a dream so potent that Bluet would forsake her opulent life and beloved daughter to follow him back to the grinding poverty, terrors, and brutality of Stalin’s Russia. But the price would be even higher than that. Soon she would be forced to choose between the life of her lover and the life of her daughter, even while keenly aware of the ultimate tragedy of Marc’s mission.

The compelling true story of two remarkable individuals caught up in the maelstrom of twentieth-century history, Russian Dance is a timeless tale of ill-starred love and espionage that leaves the reader in its thrall until the very lastpage. It also provides a ringside seat at one of the bloodiest moments in Soviet history. Working from original sources, including interviews with Bluet herself, award-winning journalist Andrée Aelion Brooks paints an intimate portrait of the couple’s romance and later descent into despair. She also opens a rare page in Jewish history by providing fresh insights into the cruel fate meted out by Stalin to the Jewish visionaries and heroes who had been at the heart of the Revolution. We experience the agony of their downfall and dismissal even from the memories of their own people—the very people they tried so hard to serve.

Publishers Weekly

Tragic love affairs that destroy a powerful man's career and a woman's life will always exert a grip on our imaginations and sense of historical inevitability (think, for example, of Charles Stewart Parnell and Mrs. O'Shea). The relationship revealed in Brooks's well-researched chronicle, while not as momentous or famous as some, provides a fascinating record of an audacious love affair as well as a significant insight into the early years of Stalin's reign in Russia. In the 1920s, charming Bluet Rabinoff presided over the celebrity-filled salon convened by her husband, famed New York impresario Max Rabinoff. When she fell in love with dashing Marc Cheftel, a physician sent to the U.S. ostensibly on behalf of the Russian Red Cross, she had no idea that he was in fact a master spy, high up in the GPU. Brilliant and ambitious, Cheftel was also an idealist who thought the Bolshevik revolution would banish poverty and anti-Semitism in his country. When he convinced Bluet to divorce her husband, leave her teenage daughter and return to Russia with him, he felt sure that he'd soon be sent to a glamorous post in Europe. Instead, both he and Bluet became hostages to history. Stalin's ruthless ascendancy and his purges of the original Bolshevik conspirators gain a vivid immediacy in Brooks's descriptions of daily life in Moscow during the accelerating reign of terror and the events that sealed Marc's doom. The author's access to documents, letters, survivors of the era and to Bluet Rabinoff herself before she died in 1976 contribute to a gripping narrative. Some may quibble because journalist and nonfiction writer Brooks (The Woman Who Defied Kings) has reconstructed conversations, but there is ample documentation here of a personal tragedy within the larger vortex of cataclysmic betrayal and misery. Agent, Carolyn French. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Andrée Aelion Brooks, author, journalist, and lecturer, was a contributing columnist and newswriter for the New York Times for eighteen years. In 1990, she received the American Jewish Woman of the Year Achievement Award from the American Jewish Committee and, in 2001, a special award from the Consulate General of Israel in conjunction with the American Sephardi Federation for her work on Sephardi Jewish history. She has also received an outstanding achievement award from the National Federation of Press Women. Brooks is an Associate Fellow at Yale University, as well as founder and past president of the Women’s Campaign School at Yale. Her other books include the award-winning Children of Fast-Track Parents and The Woman Who Defied Kings: The Life and Times of Doña Gracia Nasi–a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards for 2003.