There are some first-time writers who can write like veterans; one example is Elena Gorokhova. Her first book, A Mountain of Crumbs, a Memoir, is like the product of a writer who has written many books. The book gives us a view of how it was to grow up inside the Iron Curtain, deprived of the right to be a part of the world, deprived of the right to live with freedom. But there is more to Gorokhova’s memoir than just the description of the kind of life she had inside the Soviet Union four decades ago, it is an honest look and commentary on the situation. Gorokhova’s kind of honesty is so powerful that the book cuts like a knife. Reading the memoir produces vivid pictures that flow like a river, and you find yourself in the shoes of the young Gorokhova, feeling her hopes and pain.
Although English is her second language, Gorokhova is able to use it with such skill. She has a way of describing things and putting words together that reading the book is like reading a long poem with complex but perfect rhythm. Look at how the book opens, these first two paragraphs have so much power, they set everything in place and prepare you for what sweet pain comes in the next 300 pages:
I wish my mother had come from Leningrad, from the world of Pushkin and the tsars, of granite embankments and lace ironwork, of pearly domes buttressing the low sky. Leningrad’s sophistication would have infected her the moment she drew her first breath, and all the curved façades and stately bridges, marinated for more than two centuries in the city’s wet, salty air, would have left a permanent mark of refinement on her soul.
But she didn’t. She came from the provincial town of Ivanovo in central Russia, where chickens lived in the kitchen and a pig squatted under the stairs, where streets were unpaved and houses made from wood. She came from where they lick plates.
If you read this book, you must have a handkerchief near, there are many parts of this book that can make you cry. You will cry because you will feel the author’s pain, you will cry because you will feel the author’s little joys, you will cry because you will see how frail the human soul is, and yet feel how sturdy it is. This book is a gem, you must read it.
