A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir
Elena Gorokhova, 2009
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439125687
Summary
Elena Gorokhova’s A Mountain of Crumbs is the moving story of a Soviet girl who discovers the truths adults are hiding from her and the lies her homeland lives by.
Elena’s country is no longer the majestic Russia of literature or the tsars, but a nation struggling to retain its power and its pride. Born with a desire to explore the world beyond her borders, Elena 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 is controlled by the state the same way she is controlled by her mother, a mirror image of her motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave. In the battle between a strong-willed daughter and her authoritarian mother, the daughter, in the end, must break free and leave in order to survive.
Through Elena’s captivating voice, we learn not only the stories of Russian family life in the second half of the twentieth century, but also the story of one rebellious citizen whose curiosity and determination finally transport her to a new world. It is an elegy to the lost country of childhood, where those who leave can never return. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1955
• Where—St. Petersburg, Russia
• Education—University of Leningrad; Ph.D.,
Rutgers University (New Jersey)
• Currently—lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey, USA
Elena 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. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Slight…but endearing, a collection of well-sculptured memories about the deprivations and joys of [Gorokhova's] childhood in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). It's a book about many things, notably class, politics, identity and sex, but one that circles around as often as not to the author's rumbling stomach.... A Mountain of Crumbs is a minor-key coming-of-age story, one that's tinged with real darkness around its edges.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
[Gorokhova's] exquisitely wrought, tender memoir of growing up in the Soviet Union…could be taught as a master class in memoir writing: the key is not to collect facts and recollections but to truthfully reimagine one's life…Gorokhova writes about her life with a novelist's gift for threading motives around the heart of a story, following its plot with a light touch and unwavering honesty. Each chapter distills a new revelation in poetic prose.
Elena Lappin - New York Times Book Review
Despite the feelings of claustrophobia and low-level menace conjured up, the portrait of a Soviet childhood is dreamily nostalgic.... [Yet] Sometimes it’s hard to believe how limited people’s lives were in Seventies Russia. Gorokhova finds herself, as a young woman, never having been inside a restaurant, not knowing what asparagus is when she reads about it in a book, used to eating all the stale food in the house before being allowed to eat anything fresh. ....In the end her escape is as unromantic as it is unexpected..... The overall result, though, is a stunning memoir: subtle, yet brimming with depth and detail. It leaves you wanting more. A sequel about life in America, please?
Viv Groskop - Telegraph (UK)
Like Angela’s Ashes, the memoir of her one-time teacher Frank McCourt, Gorokhova’s A Mountain of Crumbs opens with a wish that youth had been an easier enterprise.... [But] despite Gorokhova’s debts to McCourt...Gorokhova may lack McCourt’s lush storytelling skills, but her book is also free—thankfully—of his sugary sentiment. A Mountain of Crumbs is a straightforward account of Russia in the postwar decades, one that takes the reader confidently through the slow sinking of the Soviet ship.
Alexander Nazaryan - Christian Science Monitor.
Extraordinarily rich in sensory and emotional detail.... An engrossing portrait of a very lively, intelligent girl coming of emotional and intellectual age in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.
Bookpage
Artful memoir about the angst and joys of growing up behind the Iron Curtain.... Articulate, touching and hopeful.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Explain the significance of the book title. Where did it originate? How does it keep recurring throughout the course of the book? In what way is a “mountain of crumbs” a metaphor for the failing Soviet Union?
2. Discuss the notion of vranyo. How does Elena first learn about vranyo? How do Russians play the game of vranyo in their daily lives? How is this game played in Elena’s family?
3. Elena believes her mother was once “cheerful and ironic, before she turned into a law-abiding citizen so much in need of order.” (p.99) Why do you think she changed? How did Elena avoid falling into the same trap?
4. Elena and her tutor cannot find the Russian equivalent of the English word “privacy.” What do you think this says about Russia?
5. How do Elena’s parents and grandparents represent the “old” Russia? What ideologies does Elena have trouble accepting? In what way does she voice her opposition to her mother and her beliefs in the old ways? Does she voice her opposition to anyone else?
6. What is the “secret” that Elena struggles to learn about during her teenage years? Why does she feel she cannot turn to her mother? How is her statement “There is a door between us, as always, and that’s where all important things are kept, behind closed doors” (p. 124) a metaphor for the current state of Russia and her desire to go to America?
7. After learning about what intelligentny means, who do you think best embodies it? Elena? Her sister? Her mother? Do you need to be intelligentny to decide if others are?
8. Recount the encounter between Elena and Kevin in the marketplace. How is it indicative of the differences between the East and the West?
9. Were you surprised when Elena accepted Robert’s offer of marriage? What does this say about Elena? Did your opinion of her change after learning this? If so, in what way?
10. Elena chooses to end her story with her departure to America, followed by a short epilogue about the present day. Why do you think she chose to end the story there? How would reading the story of her first few years in America impact the tone of the book for you?
(Questions issued by publisher.)