The Bridge Over The Neroch And Other Works

"Everything is always topsy-turvy here," he said.



A small town in the Ural mountains is the backdrop to the heartbreak and joys of a Russian-Jewish family, witnessing romance and illness, funerals and friendships, and the catastrophe of wartime invasion.



Amidst the snowy peaks of the Ararat valley, a married couple from Moscow admire the view from their hotel balcony, unprepared for the absurdist realities of tourism in the USSR.



From chandeliered metro stations to institute bus stops, monolithic skyscrapers and cockroach-infested apartments, Leonid Tsypkin evokes the tragicomedy of Soviet existence in transcendental prose.



Leonid Tsypkin was born in Minsk in 1926 to Russian-Jewish parents, both physicians. Summer in Baden-Baden is the culmination of a clandestine literary vocation: as a distinguished medical researcher by profession, he never saw a page published in his lifetime. This manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1981, and first published in a Russian-émigré weekly in the US. It has since been translated into over twenty languages. Tsypkin, who was twice denied permission to leave the Soviet Union, died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1982.