Before we published Jewish Luck, a memoir about two Soviet born Jewish women and their struggle to break free of the Soviet system, we read as many memoirs as we could find written by Soviet Jews. We arrived at two conclusions.
#1. There was no memoir we could find that was similar to the one we were writing about Vera and Alla.
#2 Memoirs by Soviet Jews and others from the USSR are compelling.
For your May perusal, we’re listing six of the memoirs we read during our research along with a brief summary of our impressions. Each of these memoirists writes with honesty and in his or her unique style. For each of these writers, English is not their first language but you will forget that fact as you read their works.
Azbel, Mark Ya. Refusenik: Trapped in the Soviet Union. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981.
For readers who want to understand what it was like to be an outspoken refusenik, Azbel’s book pulls no punches. He is very direct in documenting his five year struggle to leave the USSR. A physicist, Azebel was denied permission to leave for Israel in 1972. Fired from his position and with no home telephone, it was obvious to Azbel he could be dragged into an interrogation session and thrown into prison while he waited for a visa. He carried a toothbrush wherever he went just in case. Azbel’s memory of his interrogations and his incisive remarks to his interrogator allow the reader to safely enter the crazy world of being a non-citizen in the Soviet Union. As Azbel told an interviewer, “This is not a book by a writer, it is not a novel. There are living beings. This is a message, this is what goes on.”
Gessen, Masha. Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace. New York: Dial Press, 2004.
Technically this isn’t a memoir, but, then Jewish Luck is not a memoir. Gessen’s double narrative portrays her grandmothers and their struggles. Through their lives we learn the courage and resourcefulness it took to survive in the USSR from 1941-1953. Like Vera and Alla, Esther and Ruzya were best friends and like Vera and Alla their personalities are complementary rather than alike. Although Esther and Ruzya are the ages of Vera and Alla’s grandmothers, their intertwined lives reveal how two Jewish women coped with the craziness of living in the USSR under the threats of Stalin, Nazi invasion, Stalin again. How do Esther and Ruzya remain true to themselves while staying alive? This question bedeviled Vera and Alla as well.
Gorokhova, Elena. A Mountain of Crumbs. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009.
Leningrad born Elena Gorokhova attended the same school as Alla in Jewish Luck. Elena, however, is not Jewish but she shares a disdain for the vranya (deception) of Soviet life with Alla and Vera.
Gorokhova begins her memoir with her mother’s experiences in the Great Patriotic War and then moves to her own birth and growing up years in Leningrad concluding with her marriage to an American and immigration to the US before the break up of the Soviet Union.
Elena chronicles the daily restrictions of the Soviet Union and hates that she had to play the “game” of vranyo—deception. “Lock up what you think. What’s inside you no one can touch,” was the advice from Gorokhova’s grandmother.
For a lyrical account of growing up under oppression, Gorokhova has no peer.
Gorokhova, Elena. Russian Tattoo. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015.
Russian Tattoo is a sequel to A Mountain of Crumbs. It is the story of Gorokhova’s struggles acclimating to life in the US.
Russian Tattoo’smost poignant passages are descriptions of the strained relationships both with her aging mother, whom she brings to the US from Russia, and her teenage daughter. Her mother tiptoes through the house trying not to trespass in Elena’s life. Elena finds herself in her mother’s position as “old country” in relation to her own American born daughter, who meets Elena’s inquiries with hostility. It is touching that Grandmother and daughter connect deeply on their own.
Iossel, Mikhail. Every Hunter Wants to Know: A Leningrad Life. New York: WW Norton, 1991.
This is a collection of short stories which are semi-autobiographical. The name of the book comes from the eponymous story about a Soviet researcher at a Leningrad institute. Yevgeny Litovtsev, meets “Bruce,” an American. Their relationship highlights the difficulties of relationships between Russians and Americans in the Brezhnev years and the possible reprecussions for Yevgeny befriending Bruce. Subsequent stories follow Yevgeny’s life and replicate the story of many Soviet émigré wannabees. What distinguishes Iossel’s book is his beguiling writing style. It’s no wonder he’s a professor of creative writing at Concordia University in Montreal.
Rusinek, Alla. Like a Song, Like A Dream: A Soviet Girl’s Quest for Freedom. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1973.
Alla is the same age as Zhenya (b 1949)and her story is the story that Soviet Jewry activists wanted to hear. She, in fact, did tour the US for the UJA and other organizations after she was granted her visa.
Alla’s family life was turbulent. Her dad left her mom and she grew up with her mom and older sister in Moscow. She was a devoted communist, was involved in as many school activities as possible, and attended a special English school.
Her devotion to Communism waned as she came under the influence of other Jewish youth, particularly those from Riga. She learned Hebrew, read samizdat, and attended Simhat Torah services in the Moscow synagogue.
Missing from her memoir is a clear explanation how Alla moved from committed Communist to committed Zionist.
Shtern, Ludmilla. Leaving Leningrad. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2001.
Ludmilla Shtern is a research fellow at Brandeis’s Women’s Studies Research Center. She trained as a geologist at Leningrad State University. Shtern left the USSR in 1974 and her memoir is literary and tongue in cheek. Her description of the onerous bureaucracy of OVIR, the Soviet office in charge of approving exit visas demonstrates her writing prowess at its best.