Russian Tattoo
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITING
‘Incredibly powerful … by the time you reach the end, you’ll have experienced the laughter, sorrow, joy, regret, love and hurt of a real life.’ Alan Alda
‘The possibility of leaving Russia was never as thrilling as the prospect of leaving my mother.’
When Elena Gorokhova arrives in America, the only link back to her Russian past is a suitcase filled with twenty kilograms of what used to be her life. Navigating a country she had been taught to fear, Elena begins to carve out a new life in an unfamiliar world.
Before the birth of Elena's daughter, her mother comes to visit and stays for twenty-four years. Elena, must struggle with the challenge of raising an American daughter whilst living with her controlling mother, a mirror image of her Motherland.
Russian Tattoo is the story of what it means to be an outsider, and what happens when the cultures of our past and present collide. Above all, it is an insightful portrait of mothers and daughters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
