Elena Gorokhova’s compelling second memoir charts her emigration as a young woman from the Soviet Union to the United States
Elena Gorokhova’s 2010 memoir A Mountain of Crumbs was a bittersweet look back to a Soviet childhood. Gorokhova wrote it from the perspective of an immigrant in the United States, happy to be relocated but feeling painfully dislocated in the process and wanting to relive her past. And yet it already shared a feature common to the type of post-Soviet writing championed by Gary Shteyngart. You don’t really love the place where you came from. But you don’t really love the place where you’re at either.
Russian Tattoo completes the task of nostalgia and self-examination. In this sequel, Gorokhova revisits her 24-year-old self travelling to the US in 1980 with a 20kg suitcase and pretty much no idea of what awaits her. On the plane over an American passenger turns to her and said: “What you’re looking for in the US no longer exists. You’ll be happier with your family in Russia.”
She arrives as a wide-eyed language teacher, having rashly (or calculatingly?) accepted a marriage proposal from an American exchange student. Her naivety does not help their relationship, which founders almost immediately. She navigates shoe shops (bewilderingly full of shoes), learns how to eat a hamburger and, happily, remarries. It’s when her mother comes to live in New Jersey that things get more complicated: now Gorokhova really has to examine what her identity is, the old or the new.
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Russian Tattoo completes the task of nostalgia and self-examination. In this sequel, Gorokhova revisits her 24-year-old self travelling to the US in 1980 with a 20kg suitcase and pretty much no idea of what awaits her. On the plane over an American passenger turns to her and said: “What you’re looking for in the US no longer exists. You’ll be happier with your family in Russia.”
She arrives as a wide-eyed language teacher, having rashly (or calculatingly?) accepted a marriage proposal from an American exchange student. Her naivety does not help their relationship, which founders almost immediately. She navigates shoe shops (bewilderingly full of shoes), learns how to eat a hamburger and, happily, remarries. It’s when her mother comes to live in New Jersey that things get more complicated: now Gorokhova really has to examine what her identity is, the old or the new.
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