Fall Out of Heaven: An Autobiographical Journey Across Russia

by Alan Cheuse

Fall Out Of An Autobiographical Journey

Genres: History

308 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

American writer and critic.
For more than two decades, Alan Cheuse has served as NPRs voice of books. He is the author of three novels, including The Grandmothers Club and The Light Possessed, several collections of short stories, and a pair of novellas recently published in The Fires. He is also the editor of Seeing Ourselves: Great Early American Short Stories and co-editor of Writers Workshop in a Book. Stories and co-editor of Writers Workshop in a Book."
Forthcoming in March, 2015, the novel
Prayers for the Living...
Born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, Cheuse grew up in a Jewish family, the son of a Russian immigrant father and a mother of Russian and Romanian descent

Reviews

[Jrobertus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir has an interesting structure. The author’s father, “Phil” was a Jew born in the USSR and became a decorated pilot in the Red Army Air Force. He fought to suppress a local rebellion in central Asia in the late 1920’s. He was injured in combat, mustered out, worked his way to the Siberian Far East and was recalled to test pilot a new fighter plane. He stalled out and crashed into the Sea of Japan and was rescued by a Japanese freighter. He then lived in China for a while but when the Soviet Secret police came for him he fled to America. He wanted to be a writer and wrote his own story. His son, Alan, was born in the USA and did not get on well with his abusive daddy. He wanted to be a writer and Phil tried to get him to edit his own narrative. OK. So the book has alternating levels of Phil’s story, largely in the Air Force and then crossing Siberia, Alan’s story as an unhappy young man, and finally a layer in which Alan and his son travel to the USSR and revisit the places his father described in Moscow and Central Asia. The descriptions are often quite exotic as you might imagine, and the human story of a son struggling to understand and eventually empathize with his nasty father is also well done.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fall Out of Heaven is unlike any other book I have read, particularly in its device of alternating the stories of a father with that of the son, one chapter after the other.
Author Alan Cheuse uses it effectively, I think, to tell his father's written-down story of growing up a Russian Jew / Bolshevik fighter pilot (the sort of thing one could not make up) and his own story of growing up in an immigrant family in northern New Jersey with a father dealt a hand of twists, turns, and disappointments.
Throw in a third generation--Cheuse's son--accompanying him on a journey to central Asian ground trod upon by the old adventure-seeking (and, frankly, heroic) fighter pilot, and you've got an exploration of family, anti-Semitism, history, culture, introspection, and What's it All About?
Quirky. Creative. Insightful.
I liked it.

[Conrad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm always fascinated with books about aviators, so the title and cover picture caught my attention. He alternately tells the story of his father's years as an heroic young pilot in Russia and of his own youthful years growing up with his father in New Jersey, of their struggles and misunderstandings all the while taking a journey with his own son (some years after his father's death) to Russia and the places his father lived and flew in. It is a journey of understanding and reconciliation between himself and his father - a journey that all sons ultimately have to take to understand their father.

[Steven Severance · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has three braided stands to it.
There is a memoir of the author growing up in Perth Amboy New Jersy. There is a travel memoir of the author and his son on a journey through the Soviet Union in 1986. And there is a memoir of the author's father in the air force in Soviet central Asia during the 20's. Only the third strand is worth reading. The rest of the book stinks.
It is quite unfortunate that they did not just publish the father's memoir which is interesting and has some historic value.

[Sam Schulman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goodbye, Alan Cheuse, who tried to teach me about women. Fortunately, he had other accomplshments, of which this lovely book about his heroic father, who was a Red Air Force ace and a heroic defector, is merely one.