A Mountain of Crumbs

By Elena Gorokhova

A wonderful memoir of growing up in the Soviet Union. Gorokhova has a gift of telling a simple story with eye opening clarity and then driving a larger point home when  you least expect it. I enjoyed her writing style and the fascinating other world she grew up in. The book was brought to my attention as a comparison to "Angela's Ashes." While definitely in the same league, this book stands on its own.

"'May your tongues fall off, all of you, godless fooligans!' yelled Baba Manya, hurriedly crossing herself. She meant to say 'hooligans.' - hooligani - but she either couldn't pronounce the h sound or didn't know the right word. That's what they all became, my mother and her three brothers - fooligans, ardent and naive, resolute and reckless, inspired by a new god, a crossbreed of hooligans and fools." Pg 4

"What I do know is that I won't smell tobacco on his hands or feel his stubble or be 'Brother Rabbit' ever again, and that knowledge makes me cry even harder, so hard that my mother breaks out of her watering trance and presses me to her soft breasts ad whispers to Marina, "Vsyo ponimaet," which means I've instantly grown up and now understand everything." Pg 93

"I feel old, as old s Borya. I feel I no longer want to work, at least not in the House of Friendship and Peace. I don't want to wait years for a promotion that will allow me to move chairs and arrange train tickets; I don't want to wait for Tatiana Vasilievna to retire, for Rita to take her place and abuse me the wame way Tatiana Vasilievna abused her. I d on't want to squeeze into a bus twice a day at dusk, at eight in the morning and at six at night, for twenty or thirty years, before I may be allowed to coordinate the entire English-speaking world." Pg 204

"'Apartheid?' Robert squints in confusion. It doesn't matter to my aunt that apartheid is happening on the other side of the world from America. The West is the West, no matter what continent. All capitalist vices here get entangled and rolled together, like mismatched threads of wool, into one hairy ball of international evil." Pg 281

Book 39