With settings that range from the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet-era Perestroika to present-day San Francisco, Like Water and Other Stories, the first English-language collection from Leningrad-born author Olga Zilberbourg, looks at family and childrearing in ways both unsettling and tender, with characters who grapple with complicated legacies—of state, parentage, displacement, and identity. A unique portrayal of motherhood, of immigration and adaptation, and an inside account of life in the Soviet Union and its dissolution.