“ exquisitely wrought, tender memoir of growing up in the Soviet Union. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature and author of Summertime Elena Gorokhova conveys all the ugliness of daily life in Soviet Russia, as well as its humiliations, but is awake to its strangled, submerged poetry too. "The story of a young person of sparkling intelligence, full of curiosity about the world, struggling to grow and blossom under a duplicitous, censorious, and unremittingly mean-minded social system. It will give you pleasure." - Sergei Khruschchev, son of former Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev "An honest, captivating story of a girl from a middle-class Soviet family, growing into a young woman, searching for her identity and unable to find it.In the spirit of Dostoyevsky, it is also an endlessly Russian quest for self-redemption.I advise you to read the book. Those who have traveled from another place to America will find themselves in this rich memoir." - Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela's Ashes
"What is it about A Mountain of Crumbs that makes it so damn readable? Is it the setting - the Soviet Union in the second half of the last century on the verge of disintegration? Is it the author's way with the English language? This is a rich experience - a personal journey paralleled by huge national changes and ending in a deeply satisfying portrait of peace in America. "Elena Gorokhova has written the Russian equivalent of Angela's Ashes, an intimate story of growing up into young womanhood told with equal grace and humor." - Billy Collins, former U.S. It is an elegy to the lost country of childhood, where those who leave can never return. 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. 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. 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. 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 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.Įlena’s country is no longer the majestic Russia of literature or the tsars, but a nation struggling to retain its power and its pride.
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