Elena Gorokhova
publisher
Simon & Schuster
format
Hardcover
pages
310
Per Petterson
Mrs. Somebody, Somebody
Tracy Winn
With Violets
Elizabeth Robards
Bill Warrington's Last Stand
James King
A Mountain of Crumbs is the moving story of a young Soviet girl's discovery of the hidden truths of adulthood and her country's profound political deception.
Elena, born with a desire to explore the world beyond her borders, finds her passion in the complexity of the English language -- but in the Soviet Union of the 1960s, such a passion verges on the subversive. Elena's home is no longer the majestic Russia of literature or the tsars. Instead, it is a nation humiliated by its first faltering steps after World War II, putting up appearances for the sake of its regime and fighting to retain its pride.
In this deeply affecting memoir, Elena re-creates the world that both oppressed and inspired her. She recounts stories passed down to her about the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution and probes the daily deprivations and small joys of her family's bunkerlike existence. Through Elena's captivating voice, we learn not only the personal story of Russia in the second half of the twentieth century, but also the story of one rebellious citizen whose love of a foreign language finally transports her to a new world.
About the AuthorElena Gorokhova grew up in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in a courtyard that became a more accurate emblem for the Soviet life than the ubiquitous hammer and sickle: a crumbling façade with locked doors and stinking garbage bins behind them. Like everyone else, when she was nine, Elena joined the Young Pioneers and had a red kerchief tied around her neck. A tiny cell in the body of a Leningrad school collective, she promised to live, study, and work as the great Lenin bequeathed every citizen to do.
But she harbored a passion that grew into an un-Soviet failing: at age ten she was seduced by the beauty of the English language and spent the next eight years deciphering its secrets at Leningrad English school # 238, to her mother’s bewilderment. Her mother – born three years before the Soviet state – became a mirror image of her Motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave. A front-line surgeon during WWII, she wanted her daughter to be a doctor and a builder of communism, but Elena, in her mother’s words, was “stubborn as a goat.” What followed was the English Department of Leningrad University, a marriage to a visiting American student, and a scandal, both public and private. After six months of official hurdles and family turmoil, Elena left for America, a ravaged suitcase on the KGB inspector’s table with twenty kilograms of what used to be her life. What followed was unknown, and frightening, and filled with mystery.
In the United States, Elena received a Doctorate in Language Education and has taught English as a Second Language, Linguistics, and Russian at various New Jersey colleges and universities. She is married (again) and has a daughter. After taking Frank McCourt’s memoir workshop in 2004, she recalibrated everything she’d written about her Soviet life and turned it into A Mountain of Crumbs.
Her mother now lives with her in New Jersey, just as she did in Leningrad.
Beyond the book
“…her exquisitely wrought, tender memoir of growing up in the Soviet Union…could be taught as a master class in memoir writing. … Gorokhova writes about her life with a novelist’s gift for threading motives around the heart of a story. … Each chapter distills a new revelation in poetic prose. …This moving memoir made me cry.”
The New York Times Book Review, February 7, 2010 (full review)