Russian Tattoo

August 11, 2014
Gorokhova, the author of A Mountain of Crumbs, a memoir of growing up in Soviet Russia, recreates, in this engaging new work, her first experience of America in 1980 as a 20-something teacher who hastily married an American academic. She admits she was simply eager to get away from the controlling clutches of her motherland—and her mother. With wry, unswervingly honest observer’s eye, Gorokhova chronicles the increasing strangeness of her new country as she is overwhelmed by choices at the shoe store and the supermarket in Austin, Tex., where she lives with her husband Robert, who is unemotional and detached. She goes on interviews in a homespun sundress, trying to hide her sense of being “marked” as a Soviet exile, a “person with a dubious past.” Gorokhova is eventually sent to live with Robert’s psychotherapist mother in Princeton, N.J., and there, she falls in love with the more understanding Andy. With Andy’s encouragement, she quits working as a server at Beefsteak Charlie’s (she is embarrassingly bad at it) and starts teaching English to Russian immigrants at a business institute in New York City. This work from a young immigrant’s point of view is both wondrous and stinging.

November 15, 2014
In her second memoir, St. Petersburg native Gorokhova (A Mountain of Crumbs, 2010) chronicles a decadeslong clash of cultures between Russia and America.The author describes the misfortune of being married, against the will of a formidable Stalin-era apartment block of a mother, to a creepy American who wooed her with the thought that Leningrad, as the city was then called, referred to someone other than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. "This is literally Lena's city, he said, smiling at his own clever manipulation of Russian grammar," a manipulation involving the possessive form. Possessive: Her husband is nothing but, even if, soon after the papers were signed, he informed her that the marriage would be open. "I didn't know marriage could be paired with an adjective gutting out the essence of the word's meaning," she writes, "but then I didn't know lots of things." The years rolled by, and she continued to learn more about her redoubtable mom, who, having "survived the famine, Stalin's terror, and the Great Patriotic War," could be as fierce a protector in the new world as in the old. As will happen in America, one marriage gave way to another, and a child arrived and went through all the predictable stages of adolescent rebellion, not least acquiring the tattoo of the title. Still, the same old chores awaited Gorokhova, just as the same kotlety awaited anyone sitting at her table, the "oval-shaped hamburgers" reflecting the cultural collisions that threatened to unmake her life. The tone of the book is tentative, as if Gorokhova is under threat of deportation at any moment, but never meek. The author projects a quiet sense of defiance and provides occasional sharp observations about what it means to be an immigrant in an immigrant society. Overall, however, there are no surprises: The author suffered hard luck and misunderstanding, then redemption of a kind-the usual narrative arc, that is, with a pleasing payoff. Without the flair of Gary Shteyngart or the urgency of Anna Politkovskaya-of some interest but modestly so.

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October 1, 2014
Russian Tattoo is a page-turner from the start, when Gorokhova confides she's married Robert, barely knowing him, to escape the 1980s Cold War USSR and also her mother and her intense hold on her daughter's life. Gorokhova fills her story of arriving in the U.S. with telling, fascinating details, such as not knowing how to pick up and eat a hamburger, much less find work in a culture she barely understands. It's not long before she divorces her husband after meeting another man, and then her life in America begins. Inch by inch, she finds work, gains more of an education, buys a house, and has a daughter. Still writing in her engaging, fresh voice, Gorokhova then details bringing her mother over to live with her and her daughter's growing up and growing rebellious. Along the way, life brings death and change and lessons everyone has to learn; the story grows sadder, and Gorokhova's choices are often frustrating. Even so, Gorokhova (A Mountain of Crumbs, 2009) bravely, frankly shares her life; as her dying brother-in-law, Frankie, says, up until the end, It is what it is. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)