If you’ve scoured the internet and tour guides about St. Petersburg, you’ve probably encountered the phrase, “Venice of the North.” St. Petersburg (aka Leningrad) stuns visitors with its beauty and confounds travelers with its maze of canals. If you’re expecting onion domes and izba style architecture, St. Petersburg is not the place. This is the city where architect Domenico Trezzini created his own style—Petrine Baroque. Even the Soviet regime could not erase the European grandeur of St. Petersburg/Leningrad. Under the Soviets aristocratic palaces became museums and cultural palaces. Now they have been restored to their former glory. The Hermitage is as awe inspiring today as it was to St. Petersburg residents in the mid 18th century. Almost all the sites on any standard tour predate the Soviet era. It’s not hard to imagine Peter the Great’s courtiers sailing on a canal and chattering away in French. Since the demise of the...
Like laundry, revisions can be a never-ending cycle. Leslie and I make sure to do our laundry weekly and also make sure that our book is as error free as possible.
While Leslie and I have enjoyed positive reviews and little criticism from our readers, we appreciate a close reading and suggestions like those from an eagle-eyed reader. Marat Grinberg, a professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College, wrote: I did like [Jewish Luck] quite a bit: it's engaging, smart and really does provide a pretty accurate window into many aspects of Soviet life and the place of Jewishness in it. I do obviously have certain reservations about some aspects of the book, but they're minor - overall I thought it was fantastic.”
Marat eventually emailed us an extensive list of all the corrections—mostly corrections of Russian transliteration of our epigrams. If you want to read those corrections and revise your... 
