The Foreign Service Journal, November 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2021 51 town. Longtime victims of harsh racial abuse themselves, the American soldiers were nonetheless shocked at the horrors they witnessed when the “town” turned out to be the Dachau concen- tration camp. When two destitute young former inmates appeared at their encampment days later pleading for help, the soldiers, with their lieutenant’s support, sheltered the boys for a year in defiance of military rules. Withers became their surrogate parent as the boys worked alongside his soldiers, guiding them toward the understanding that, however horrid the past, the future held hope. When Withers left in 1947, the boys—fondly named Pee Wee and Solomon by the troops—were ready to start anew. Though they lost touch, Withers never forgot the experience or the boys, often sharing the stories with his own family and wondering what had become of them. In recounting his father’s stories, the author relies on painstaking research to fill in gaps and verify details. A final section describes his prolonged search for the roots of the stories and the circumstances that led to the old friends finding each other again before his father’s death. John L. Withers II joined the Foreign Service in 1984. His first posting was as a political officer at The Hague, and he later served in Nigeria, Russia and Ireland, among other assignments. He was the U.S. ambassador to Albania from 2007 to 2010. I Named My Dog Pushkin (And Other Immigrant Tales): Notes from a Soviet Girl on Becoming an American Woman Margarita Gokun Silver, Thread Books, 2021, $9.99/paperback, e-book available, 268 pages. Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union have contributed immea- surably to American literature—and to our humor. But nearly all the Russian comedians and writers who have made it big here during the past few decades have been male. It is therefore truly refreshing to get the distaff perspective on the culture shock these migrants have experienced, courtesy of Margarita Gokun Silver. Although she deploys humor effectively in this debut essay collection, Silver pulls no punches in describing the anti-Semitism she and her family encountered in the Soviet Union. But she insists that her main motivation for leaving Mother Russia while in college was something more basic. Yes, “Amerika” was forbidden and evil—but, along with milk and honey, it had Levi’s jeans. Though the narrative is intense and lively, lurching and rollicking to present the dilemmas, decisions and, later, reflections on the immigrant experience in America, the author wrote this work at a very grimmoment in October 2020. The end of the COVID-19 lockdowns was not in sight and her husband had just received a diagnosis of cancer. “I was desperate to see this collection out in the world,” she says, “and so I thought— what if accessing my funny could actually help me stay sane?” Margarita Gokun Silver is a freelance journalist, essayist and novelist. Her articles and essays have been published in The New York Times , The Washington Post and The Atlantic , and she has appeared on the BBC and National Public Radio. She and her husband, Foreign Commercial Service Officer Keith Silver, are currently in the U.S. for language training. Andean Adventures: An Unexpected Search for Meaning, Purpose and Discovery Across Three Countries Allan J. “Alonzo” Wind, independently published, 2020, $14.77/paperback, e-book available, 281 pages. Although its author spent more than 20 years in the Foreign Service with USAID, Andean Adventures is not a conventional FS memoir. Rather, it is a prequel to the author’s diplomatic career, focusing on the draw and fascination with service to higher ideals that led him there. After four years at the University of Chicago, Wind left an unfinished degree to spend two years in the U.S. Peace Corps in Ecuador (1980-1982), where he was widely known as Doctor Alonzo. (That nickname stuck and followed him through his work in Latin America, Africa and Asia.) He then worked for PLAN, a private voluntary organization in Guayaquil, and was still only 25 when he moved to Bolivia in 1985 to take the job of country director for Esperança, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in the health care field. Then, in Lima, he not only met his wife and became a father, but worked as a USAID personal services contractor for two years—all before joining the Foreign Service. “I certainly don’t recommend to anyone that they follow the exact sort of life choices I ended up facing,” Wind writes in the