Book Review: Post-Soviet immigrant odyssey

Elena Gorokhova’s memoir ‘Russian Tattoo’ tells the story of three generations of women searching for belonging.

By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
Elena Gorokhova (photo credit: LAUREN PERLSTEIN)
Elena Gorokhova
(photo credit: LAUREN PERLSTEIN)
On her first full day in the United States, Elena Gorokhova awoke with images floating in her memory: of her bed in Leningrad, with its white duvet and square pillow, in the room she shared with her mother; and of sitting in front of a mirror, “where nothing interesting was ever reflected.”
As “alien objects” – a dresser, a television, a wool blanket – come into focus, however, Elena understands she is no longer home.
In Russian Tattoo, a sequel to A Mountain of Crumbs, her memoir about growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s, Gorokhova, a professor at Hudson County Community College, sets her experiences in the US – her two marriages; her relationship with her daughter Sasha, an animal rights advocate and aspiring photographer; and her mother, who arrives to help care for the baby and stays for 24 years in the context of her naïve hope that once she crossed the Soviet border, she would find herself “miraculously free, weighed down only by the one 20-kilogram suitcase Aeroflot allowed.” And by her evolving realization that “like a virus,” Russia had settled in her blood “and hitched a ride across the ocean.”
Not surprisingly, Gorokhova has virtually nothing positive to say about life in the Soviet Union.
In Leningrad, she writes, “rudeness was ordinary and familiar,” a byproduct of deprivation of the necessities of life.
Day-to-day existence could be managed if Soviet citizens played the game called vranyo: pretending to do something while those who watched pretended they did not know about the pretense. When comedian Yakov Smirnoff claims that “In America, you break law; in Russia, law breaks you,” Elena nods; his statement “was the essence of what my Motherland believed in.” In three short syllables, she indicates, the word bespredel, a staple of conversations in Soviet kitchens, encapsulated the hopeless and desperation in the Soviet Union, “the idea of being placed beyond all possible limits.”
Beautifully written, Russian Tattoo begins to sparkle when Gorokhova turns to the ordinary moments of her odyssey, the “bread and milk and chores, the things that make up a life.” Her account of her stint as a trainee and server at Beefsteak Charlie’s in New Jersey is hilarious and, in its own way, poignant. “What is pasta?” she asks. With an apologetic smile, her colleague replies, unhelpfully, “Pasta is... pasta.”
At the grand opening of the restaurant, Elena, who has committed to memory six types of lettuce she never knew existed, stands in the dining room, decked out in a white shirt and black pants, wearing a red apron with a white button that announces “My Name is Elena. I’m Gonna Spoil You.” She tells herself she is just like Natasha Rostova from War and Peace, waiting for her first dance.
When her first customer orders a screwdriver, Elena doesn’t understand why he wants a tool, clutches her fingers around her writing pad, rushes to the bar and repeats what she thinks she has heard. Miraculously, the strategy works.
Until it doesn’t. In waitressing, “where timing and speed trump the knowledge of linguistics,” she is getting Fs from her supervisors. “Never been to Russia,” a slightly tipsy man with “a gold chain and brick-colored face” declares. “My advice to you – go back to your husband in Texas.”
And Gorokhova’s account of her trials and tribulations with Sasha will resonate with many parents. At 14, Sasha pierces her nose; a year later, she becomes a vegan.
At 16, Sasha is arrested for shoplifting; a bit later, after she has dropped out of college, she lands in jail for protesting against cruelty to animals. And she owns an AK-47. Elena often thinks she is as disconnected from Sasha as she is from her mother: “We speak different languages.
Mama doesn’t know English and Sasha doesn’t know Russian, all because I have been unable to teach them.”
Nor can she understand how anyone could pass up a chance to study at a school which does not require a drill in the tenets of “Scientific Communism.”
An outsider in Sasha’s life, Gorokhova feels “like an ignorant and clueless immigrant, again.”
You are never in doubt, however, that this story will have a happy ending. Mother and daughter reconcile – and bond.
They visit Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, walking around the city until their feet hurt. Sasha snaps photograph after photograph.
They release grandma’s ashes “into the salty Baltic wind she knew so well.”
Elena thinks about how much her mother loved her – “despite a million things I had done to gouge more lines into her face and turn her hair as white as this courtyard in January.” She drapes her arms around her daughter’s shoulders, and the two Russian-American women “sit on the bench without moving, without saying a word.”
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.