A Mountain of Crumbs: a Memoir

A Mountain of Crumbs
by Elena Gorokhova
New York, 2010. 305 pgs. Biography

Elena Gorkhova's mother was born in Central Russa, a provincial who came to Leningrad with her third husband and, in spite of her medical degree, was always a peasant at heart. Elena wishes for a better life away from the "games" of the Brezhnev-era Communist state, where everyone pretends to do what they are supposed to do while their "watchers" are pretending they don't know that everyone is pretending. Once a year her school class is herded onto a streetcar for a trip to Dental Clinic #34 where state-sponsored dentistry is wrought on their teeth. Elena works hard and does well in school, unlike that dvoika Dimka who is always asking uncomfortable questions and swanning around on the linoleum like he is skating. As Elena works her way through school she falls in love with the English language and has a tutor to help her get into an English-language school. Neither she nor the tutor can understand the English word "privacy." For all its dreariness and hypocrisy, Mother Russia still weaves her spell, from the gray and silver waters of the Gulf of Finland where Elena's father goes fishing, to the deep woods where she hunts mushrooms, to the golden spires of the Peter and Paul fortress. Elena manages against all odds to come to America where she sometimes wishes her daughter were more like her--one who memorized Pushkin in school, read Turgenev, could picture the perfect rows of strawberries at the dacha. But she is an American child and her mother, though a Russian soul, writes like an angel in her second tongue. Highly recommended.