About M. Gessen
M. Gessen (formerly known as Masha Gessen; Russian: Маша Гессен) is a Russian American journalist, author, and translator who has written extensively on LGBT rights. Gessen writes primarily in English but also in Russian. In addition to authoring several nonfiction books, they have contributed to The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, and U.S. News & World Report. Gessen has been an opinion columnist at The New York Times since May 2024 and was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 2017 to 2024. == Early life and education == Gessen was born into a Jewish family in Moscow to Alexander and Yelena Gessen. Gessen's paternal grandmother, Ester Goldberg, the daughter of a socialist mother and a Zionist father, was born in Białystok, Poland, in 1923 and emigrated to Moscow in 1940. Ester's father Jakub Goldberg died in 1943, in either the Białystok Ghetto or a concentration camp. As a Judenrat member he was forced to assist the Nazis by, among other things, providing lists of Jews for deportation. Gessen's maternal grandmother, Rosalia (Ruzya) Solodovnik, worked as a censor for the Stalinist government until she was fired during an antisemitic purge. Gessen's maternal grandfather, Samuil, was a committed Bolshevik who died during World War II, leaving Ruzya to raise Yelena alone.
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