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41 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Waiting twenty-four years for the curtain to rise, December 12, 2009
This review is from: A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (Hardcover)
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"I think of my mother, the one in the portrait her brother painted before he died (in the Great Patriotic War) ... But what is it that wiped the smile off her face and dimmed the luster in her eyes? Was it the war, the wayward husbands, the two dead brothers? Or did it happen later, when my father got sick and needed a hospital and they refused to admit him? My mother knocked on the door of every party boss in Leningrad, until finally one issued an order to let him in for one week. A special ukaz ..." - Elena Gorokhova
"I think of the dream I had about (my father) when I was eight, in which he sat in his rowboat and spoke about theater, about the audience holding their breath and growing silent the moment before the curtain is about to go up. The anticipation of magic, he called it, the expectation of illusion. The moment when the noise stops. The moment when you're no longer ordinary." - Elena Gorokhova
Elena Gorokhova was born in 1955 in Leningrad (before and after the Soviet era, St. Petersburg) of a physician mother and her third husband, a Communist Party apparatchik. At twenty-four, Elena immigrated to the United States. In 2008, she wrote A MOUNTAIN OF CRUMBS, an account of her life from age five to her emigration from the Motherland.
Skipping through the years of her life in Leningrad a year or two at a time, Gorokhova's chronicle includes such experiences more or less unique to a Soviet (as opposed to an American) citizen: her induction into the Young Pioneers, hunting for mushrooms in the forest, lengthy store queues for basic foodstuffs, serving as a Leningrad tour guide, restrictions against unsanctioned contact with foreigners, vacationing with peers on the Crimean seashore, and teaching Russian to American exchange students at Leningrad University. But her narrative also includes activities that transcend borders, politics and cultures - activities familiar to those, such as myself, who grew up in the United States of the 50s, 60s and 70s: classroom drop and cover drills in anticipation of a Cold War nuclear blast, the dreaded childhood appointment with the dentist, a visit to the grandparents' rural homestead, the confused and frustrated curiosity about sex, the adolescent schoolyard crush, the first job, parental opposition to one's chosen career, the tyranny of low-level bureaucrats, and the petty spitefulness of co-workers.
For the Western reader, Elena's winning story provides a window on urban life in the European half of America's and Britain's most formidable Cold War adversary. Gorokhova's memoir should remind us of the basic commonality of the human experience regardless of ideological and political differences.
A MOUNTAIN OF CRUMBS has, however, two flaws that cause me to knock off a star. Elena became infatuated with the English language, and mastering it became her academic major. With such came a desire to at least visit, if not immigrate to, the West. Yet, nowhere in the book is the genesis of this relationship with English explained. One can only infer from the effect pending marriage to an American student had on her mental attitude and self-perceived place in Soviet society:
"I'm glad I'm marrying (Robert) because I like his foreignness. I like that he represents the forbidden and the unknown, that his nationality makes people gasp. I like that Robert has lifted me above the collective and now I can be the opposite of what we all are here, cynical and meek ... I like that I am no longer, as I was in (the) third grade, a yearning Pioneer vying for attention ... I think of my imminent marriage as a play with a punch-line ending that is going to stun the English Department of Leningrad University into near unconsciousness ... students will whisper in the hallways, voices tinged with respect and envy."
Disillusionment with life in the U.S.S.R, the rulers of which promised so much and delivered so little to nourish the inner spirit? Most certainly that.
Finally, Elena's subsequent life in the U.S. since 1979 rates only a three-page Epilogue. After so many years waiting for the curtain to rise, did she find magic and illusion in her new home? What was it like to wander an American supermarket and chain-bookstore with all their abundance for the first time? How did the reality of Western economic strata compare with strident Soviet claims? How did she react to the open and rambunctious U.S. political process? What was her first impression of American road traffic? She doesn't say. Perhaps the author is saving that part of the story for a sequel. I think she owes the reader an answer to those questions after such an engaging build-up.
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26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nyet huda bez dobra, December 16, 2009
This review is from: A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (Hardcover)
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Nyet huda bez dobra - There is no evil without good. Ms. Ghorokhova's memoir can be summed up in that single pithy line. But oh, what that summary would leave out! I loved reading A Mountain of Crumbs; though written by a non-native English speaker, she is so facile with the language, has such a perfect ear for the funny, or poetic, or heartbreaking turn of phrase - she had no trouble getting those words down. Her family, friends, and colleagues practically leap from the pages in startling clarity. Told with a true storyteller's sense of timing, the book was as engrossing and suspense-filled as any novel worth its salt, and all the more intriguing because it's a memoir of a time and place that is 360 degrees from the lives many (American) readers of the current generation live. Ms. Ghorokhova writes with somber precision and large compassion, capturing small details with which she paints the Big Picture. I would totally recommend this for high-schoolers as well as adult readers.
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Profound journey, January 6, 2010
This review is from: A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir (Hardcover)
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Of all personal accounts I've read recently, this is by far one of the best. In July 1979, the year the author emigrated, I visited the Soviet Union. That year, eight of my distant Leningrad cousins also emigrated, each allocated 200 kilos of possessions, 92 rubles and wedding rings, their only valuables. I can relate.
Gorokhova's poetic descriptions of Russian oppression reverberates mightily for me. I witnessed and sensed it first hand. In three weeks of visits to Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa and Leningrad, we met some family so frightened they refused to speak English on city streets and received us silently until they'd shuttered apartment windows and barricaded their doors. The atmosphere in Odessa and Kharkov were particularly harsh. Apartments were one, two or three rooms, at most, for even the largest multi-generational families.
We knew the feasts served to us either cost several months' wages (on the black market) or endless hours in lines --- unknowingly waiting for "something worth buying" at the end. Black market dealers approached us in quiet spots near Red Square, the Odessa steps, Kiev's monument of heroes and Leningrad's Nevsky Prospect. Lines, often two abreast, wound around corners or into the next block in every city. We waited ourselves a few times to experience what ordinary Russians suffered to buy most everything. The result was usually a hand of bananas, bag of oranges or toilet paper --- provided the items weren't sold out upon reaching the line's end. Department store shelves were virtually naked but for odd-sized or grotesquely colored underwear no one wanted or bought.
Readers who have not experienced all this may be all the more overwhelmed by the tight, neat impact of Gorokhova's games of vranyo --- pretending, which everyone involved pretends seriously to believe, while everyone knows that it's all pretend.
This was a major factor in Soviet life, populated even for veteran Communist party officials by inadequate health care (often resulting in needless death), inadequate homes, inadequate food, inadequate clothing, inadequate income --- and the complete absence of privacy, a foreign concept that Russians literally could not comprehend, much less determine how to appropriately translate into Russian.
Every experience --- from Gorokhova's kindergarten and grade school through her high school and university matriculation --- involved vranyo. But even her dealings with family members were largely draped by her innate recognition that nothing was right with the Soviet world view or life. Her questions as to why, or potential differences elsewhere, collected in a complete vacuum, closed off to external sources of information and any open discussion.
Alas, far too many Americans seem now enamored with socialist thinking. Indeed, one recent interlocutor described another as "an enemy of the people" just for disagreeing about the best potential resolution for a societal ill all present recognized as major. To my horror, the verbal assailant spoke without irony --- apparently unaware that such a charge during the Soviet era most often resulted in death by a firing squad, with no semblance of a fair trial.
By itself, Gorokhova's poetic language is enough to strongly recommend her book.
More importantly, however, the volume is an extraordinary reminder of the horrible costs to individuals and families in societies that lack U.S. Constitutional rights to freedom of expression and religion, property, private businesses and free and open commerce. Indeed, all high school global history teachers should immediately add this title to their reading lists --- to inform both students and their sometimes unconscionably ill-advised parents.
--- Alyssa A. Lappen
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