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by Sasha Perelman (Author)
"Sasha's brave, poignant new book is a page turner! Her writing is powerful, potent and riveting, as she takes us on a journey of her own self-discovery, that becomes our journey of self-discovery, through her expansive words and universal stories."
- Regena Thomashauer, NYTimes Best-Selling Author, Founder and CEO of The School of Womanly Arts
The Longest Road asks a universal question: What are you carrying that does not belong to you?
In the Mexican jungle, Sasha Perelman confronts how scarcity became an inherited wound across generations of women: her grandmother's fierce practicality born of war and grief, her mother's survival-driven control, her own relentless drive to prove her worth. Yet within these patterns lies an unexpected revelation-the extraordinary ability to transform limitation into possibility.
In The Longest Road, Sasha unearths the lineage of Soviet Jewish survival that shaped her life long before she was born. Through a series of plant medicine ceremonies, she steps into the memories and unspeakable secrets of her ancestors, and begins to understand the deeper forces behind her family's escape from the former USSR.
Visions reveal acts of defiant courage: an aunt who transformed a pair of brown leather boots into a strategy for securing exit visas; a grandfather, her namesake, whose final sacrifice opened the path to freedom in America; and a clandestine matzo operation under threat of imprisonment. In witnessing these stories, Sasha begins to grasp not only what they endured, but what she has carried forward on their behalf.
Moving between Soviet and American identities, between past and present, and between survival and becoming, Perelman shows that healing is neither forgetting nor erasing. It is the conscious act of choosing what to carry forward.
With clarity, honesty, and poetic precision, this memoir reveals that while trauma threads its way through generations, so do resilience, imagination, transformation, and love. For anyone seeking to honor their ancestors while breaking free from inherited pain, The Longest Road offers a roadmap for remembering, releasing, and reclaiming one's place in the lineage.
On this journey, Sasha reconciles the painful truth that the scars of survival are passed through bloodlines, but healing generational trauma is an intentional choice.
