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Off the Shelf
By Suzanne Donahue
| Monday, April 14, 2014
A Mountain of Crumbs by Elena
Gorokhova is a beautifully written and lyrical memoir about coming of age
in the Cold War years of 60’s & 70’s Soviet Russia. With every article
about the Olympics and the Crimean Crisis, I am reminded of this book and
how the country, which pretends to be so different, is still very much the
same as the one Elena grew up in and fled from the moment she could
manufacture the chance.
A much as this is a story of enduring life under the
suffocation of Communist rule it is really the story of a girl struggling
against - and breaking free from - a powerful over-bearing mother who she
loves and seems to fail at every turn.
Elena’s mother, a doctor, Professor of Anatomy, and avowed
Communist already had one daughter and had lost two husbands before she
married Elena’s father in 1950. What she went through during the two wars,
Stalin’s Purge and the Famine made her determined to protect her children
from harm and want but, to Elena, her mother’s irrational dictatorial ways
mirrored those of the State. It is to the writer’s credit that you
sympathize and can understand her mother’s fear and strength, knowing that
the wrong thing said in the wrong place can lead to disaster and that if
she didn’t force as much as she does out of her dacha garden in the summer,
they might not eat during the winter.
But Elena is not the obedient Young Pioneer and Soviet citizen
her mother and country expect her to be. She is a girl who dreams of
speaking English and exploring the world. She wants to talk about
books and poetry, to understand if personal happiness and duty are mutually
exclusive, she wants to be kissed.
As a child of parents who work for the state and the sister of
an up-and-coming actress who stars in state film and theater productions
Elena is immersed in the hypocrisy of vranyo – the knowledge that
the system is corrupt, the people know it’s corrupt and the government
acknowledges they know and everyone moves along. Even so, Elena wants
more out of life than she can expect if she follows the path her mother
wants for her.
The stories she tells of her schooling, her friends, her
struggles with boys and the adventures she has outside her mother’s reach
paint a picture of a time and place that seem closer to the turn of the
last century than the middle of the 20th century.
At school and at home Elena must constantly judge what
behavior is acceptable and what will get her in trouble. When she is
selected as a tour guide for foreign students and later as an office worker
at the House of Friendship and Peace she is exposed to a world rarely
experienced by her compatriots but the rules governing her behavior – can
she accept a gift, is she allowed into a hotel or restaurant, how far can
she accompany a foreigner – are only sometimes clear and her navigation of
these rules is often so fraught that I don’t know how she does it so
calmly. Her navigation of her relationships, with her family, friends, and
men, is no less fraught and how she deals with everything in her life makes
for compelling, sometimes heartbreaking, reading.
What I love so much about this book is how beautifully Elena
writes. Her sentences soar and she is so good at immersing you in the
story that you are with her in her classroom with the wretched teacher Nina
Sergeevna; her mother’s lab where her Aunt Klava “rasps tobacco-smelling
words into her ears”; and on the streets of Leningrad as tour guide for
Kevin and other clueless British tourists who are shown a Russia that does
not exist for her fellow citizens. Reading where she comes from and where
she wants to be you completely... READ FULL
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