There was absolutely nothing in here to glamourize Soviet Russia, not even in its most glamourous city. What I did note was how idyllic it made my mother’s own youth in Czechoslovakia seem. Once she moved on to her own childhood and adolescence I rather loss interest. Those initial passages, indeed the first two chapters of the book that deal with Gorokhova’s family history, remain the most fascinating to me. Not a warm, indulgent maternal figure by any means but one of great strength and all the more compelling for that. There’s a life I’d like to know more about! A handsome, thrice-married doctor, she served in military hospitals during WWII and raised two daughters largely on her own. She came from the provincial town of Ivanovo in central Russia, where chickens lived in the kitchen and a pig squatted under the stairs, where streets were unpaved and houses made from wood. Leningrad’s sophistication would have infected her the moment she drew her first breath, and all the curved facades and stately bridges, marinated for more than two centuries in the city’s wet, salty air, would have left a permanent mark of refinement on her soul.īut she didn’t. I wish my mother had come from Leningrad, from the world of Pushkin and the tsars, of granite embankments and lace ironwork, of pearly domes buttressing the low sky. Gorokhova begins the book promisingly, talking about her mother and wishing, like all children, that she was something other than what she was: She is the character who sticks in your head while Gorokhova fades quickly away.īut for Gorokhova as a child, her mother with her loud, blunt ways was an embarrassment. However, I was introduced to Gorokhova’s impressive mother who, frankly, deserves a book entirely to herself, and for that I will be forever grateful. Mushroom hunting in the forest, initiation into Young Pioneers, weekends fixing up the family dacha, all of this was a little too stereotypical for me, the kind of thing I’d heard from my own mother and from other memoirs.
I’d gone into the book hoping for a unique perspective, something that I hadn’t got from other memoirs based elsewhere in the U.S.S.R. Gorokhova is charming and at times quite engaging overall, it was a pleasant but not particularly special or memorable reading experience. A Mountain of Crumbs by Elena Gorokhova is a good but certainly not great memoir of Gorkhova’s life growing up in St.
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