Mother Winter
A Memoir
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
"Lyrical and emotionally gutting." —O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE
“Intellectually satisfying [and] artistically profound.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW)
“Mesmeric.”—THE PARIS REVIEW
“Vividly awesome and truly great." —EILEEN MYLES
“Gorgeous, gutting, unforgettable." —LENI ZUMAS
“Brilliant.” —MICHELLE TEA
An arresting memoir equal parts refugee-coming-of-age story, feminist manifesto, and meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and art that follows award-winning writer Sophia Shalmiyev’s flight from the Soviet Union, where she was forced to abandon her estranged mother, and her subsequent quest to find her.
Russian sentences begin backward, Sophia Shalmiyev tells us on the first page of her striking lyrical memoir. To understand the end of her story, we must go back to the beginning.
Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev was raised in the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where anti-Semitism and an imbalance of power were omnipresent in her home. At just eleven years old, Shalmiyev’s father stole her away to America, forever abandoning her estranged alcoholic mother, Elena. Motherless on a tumultuous voyage to the states, terrified in a strange new land, Shalmiyev depicts in urgent, poetic vignettes her emotional journeys through an uncharted world as an immigrant, artist, and, eventually, as a mother of two. As an adult, Shalmiyev voyages back to Russia to search endlessly for the mother she never knew—in her pursuit, we witness an arresting, impassioned meditation on art-making, gender politics, displacement, and most potently, motherhood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this bold if uneven memoir, Shalmiyev, former nonfiction editor for the Portland Review, writes of being a motherless Russian immigrant, addressing the woman who "left me for the bottle long before my father took me away to America." Stitching together lyrical essays, fragmented narratives, and critical commentary, she reflects on "Elena. Mother. Mama," whose absence led her to seek "surrogate mothers for myself: feminists, writers, activists, painters, ballbusters." Loosely linear with discursive asides, Shalmiyev shares memories of her mother's drunken promiscuity, her own neglected childhood raised by an enigmatic father, and their emigration from Leningrad to New York in 1990. After her arrival in America at age 11, the narrative becomes more chronological and focused. Shalmiyev describes her college years in Seattle as a sex worker; a fruitless trip to Russia to find Elena; and her subsequent marriage, miscarriage, and role as mother; she intersperses these accounts with musings on art, feminism, Russian history, and the work of Pauline R age, Ana s Nin, and Susan Sontag (whose son was raised by his father, "purposefully, unlike my mom, so that she can think clearly and write"). Shalmiyev's prose can be brilliant, but at times overreaches ("Father never got wintery feet" instead of, simply, cold feet), and the book's ragged continuity stalls any momentum. This ambitious contemplation on a child's unreciprocated love for her mother trips over its own story, resulting in an ambiguous, unresolved work.
