My Writing Archives - Alina Adams

Love in the Afternoon, and Evening Explores Soap TV’s Most Controversial Storylines

Alina Adams — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:34:55 +0000

My book review at: https://soaphub.com/general-soap-operas/love-in-the-afternoon-and-evening-book-review/

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The Lost Girl of Craven County (JBC Review)

Alina Adams — Sun, 10 May 2026 13:19:19 +0000

Read what I thought of the novel at: https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/the-lost-girl-of-craven-county

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If the 1950s Hollywood Blacklist Was Wrong, What’s Different in 2025?

Alina Adams — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:21:41 +0000

Because I wasn’t raised by American parents—and because I am an obsessive research geek—everything I learned about Hollywood history (and American history, really) I learned from reading books and from watching documentaries and from Hollywood telling stories about itself.

By the time I was a teenager, I knew for an uncontested fact that the most awful, most unjust, and most severe infringement of human rights ever known to man was the Hollywood blacklist. Read more at: https://judithmagazine.substack.com/p/if-the-1950s-hollywood-blacklist

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Writing Soviet Jewish Experiences: A Conversation with Sasha Vasilyuk

Alina Adams — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:20:13 +0000

I interview Sasha for Jewish Book Council at: https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/writing-soviet-jewish-experiences-a-conversation-with-sasha-vasilyuk

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You’ve Told Me Before (JBC Review)

Alina Adams — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 13:36:30 +0000

You’ve Told Me Before by Jennifer Anne Moses offers a refreshing alternative in the Jewish short story genre. That’s because while many of her characters do their fair share of kvetching — with some good and some less good reasons — the majority of them remain devoid of self-pity, holding onto optimism and a sense of humor (if often of the self-deprecating sort).

Read the entire review at: https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/youve-told-me-before

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How Moscow’s 1957 World Youth Festival Inspired Me to Go On Pretending

Alina Adams — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 15:53:36 +0000

I was five years old, living in Odessa, then-USSR, when I saw my first Black man. “Look, Mama,” I exclaimed, delighted, “a CHOCOLATE person!”

“No,” she corrected me. “That’s a Negro.”

Two years later, we moved to the United States. And while San Francisco had fewer African-American residents than New York City, where I live now, I grew accustomed to seeing people of different backgrounds around me, Asians, Hispanics, and yes, Black people (I quickly learned that the Soviet term was not an acceptable one to use).

Growing up in the Soviet Union, the only African Americans I was familiar with were Paul Robeson and Angela Davis. But I had also heard about the “children of the rainbow,” those born to one Russian and one African (as well as many other ethnicities) parent after the 1957 World Youth Festival in Moscow, during the reign of Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party.

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How Being ‘Of the Book’ Saved My Relationship with My Son

Alina Adams — Thu, 29 May 2025 13:57:43 +0000

I wasn’t proud. I was furious. I am not a person who gets furious. My husband jokes that I’m the sort of person who “gets handed crap and makes crap pancakes, instead.” I handle problems not with anger but with action. I don’t dwell on what has happened, I leap straight into the “how do we make this better” stage.

But, with my son, I was furious.

Entire confession at: https://judithmagazine.substack.com/p/how-being-of-the-book-saved-my-relationship

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Go On Pretending: From Stalin’s Doctors Plot to Soviet Central Television

Alina Adams — Wed, 14 May 2025 15:19:28 +0000

Josef Stalin’s Doctors Plot found him proclaiming that a secret cabal of medical professionals was conspiring to murder leading government and party officials. It began with the arrest of nine doctors – six of them Jews, continued with press accusations of the Soviet Union’s Jews being responsible for a variety of robberies and other crimes due to their status as “rootless cosmopolitans” and “Zionist agents” in cahoots with the American and British intelligence services.

TASS was authorized (ordered) to report that: The majority of the participants of the terrorist group… were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence – the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called “Joint.” The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed… Unmasking the gang of poisoner-doctors struck a blow against the international Jewish Zionist organization…. Now all can see what sort of philanthropists and “friends of peace” hid beneath the sign-board of “Joint.”

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The Mistake (Jewish Book Council Review)

Alina Adams — Mon, 12 May 2025 19:43:55 +0000

Is placing a child with a foot in each of two worlds, two cultures, two religions a mistake? That’s the question author Mara Schiffren sets out to answer in her historical fiction, The Mistake: The Marcus Chronicles, the first book in a series.

Read the complete review at: https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/the-mistake

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Interracial Relationships, Soap Operas and Me

Alina Adams — Thu, 08 May 2025 16:06:56 +0000

From “One Life to Live” to “Guiding Light” to “Days of our Lives” to “All My Children” to “The Young and the Restless” to “As the World Turns” to, naturally, “Beyond the Gates.”

Get the whole story at: https://www.talkhouse.com/interracial-relationships-soap-operas-and-me

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