Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing

_{CHAPTER SIX} 1960s: CORN, COMMUNISM, CAVIAR

The year I was born, 1963, is remembered by Russians for one of the worst crop failures in post-Stalinist history. War rationing still fresh in their memory, comrades found themselves back in breadlines with queue numbers scribbled on their hands in violet ink so indelible and so poisonous, the joke was that it infected your blood. All over Moscow adults enlisted schoolchildren to take their place in the line. For handing over as well the extra ration of bread they were allowed, some enterprising Young Pioneers made small fortunes charging ten kopeks per breadline.

Coarse and damp was the bread waiting at the end of the line. Not just damp, but often oozing weird greenish gunk: the flour had been stretched out with dried peas. Still, Moscow was hardly near starvation. In one of those savory ironies of socialist food distribution, some stores carried shrimp and crab from Vladivostok. But regular citizens didn’t touch these exotic pink Far Eastern crustaceans out of the pompous pages of Kniga. Regular citizens hadn’t a clue what shrimp were. People spat hardest at the fourteen-kopek cans of corn stacked up on store counters in Giza-scaled pyramids. All corn—no bread. That was everyone’s curse for Kukuruznik (Corn Man), the blabbering clown in the Kremlin who’d crowned this stupid, alien corn “the new czarina of Russian fields.”

“What does the 1963 harvest look like?” went a popular joke. “Like Khrushchev’s hairdo (bald).”

Things were going badly for Nikita Sergeevich. After a stretch of prodigious economic boom and scientific achievement, his career was belly flopping. There was the bungled Karibsky krizis (Russian for the Cuban missiles affair). His Virgin Lands scheme of planting grain en masse on the Central Asian steppes, promising initially, was ending in a cartoonish fiasco with millions of tons of topsoil simply blowing away. And his dairy and meat price hikes in 1962 had erupted in riots in the southern city of Novocherkassk. “Khrushchev’s flesh—for goulash!” railed a protest banner. The State responded with tanks, killing twenty-three rioters.

The massacre was concealed; but the Leader’s kukuruza (corn) disaster could not be. Enthralled by a visiting Iowa farmer in 1955, the Bald One had introduced corn as the magic crop that would feed Russia’s cattle. Corn was forced down human throats too. Khrushchev-look-alike chefs sang songs to the new corn in short propaganda films; animated rye and barley welcomed this new corn off the train in cartoons. “The road to abundance is paved with kukuruza!” went a popular slogan. Maize was planted everywhere—while American instructions for proper seeding and care were everywhere ignored. After a couple of encouraging harvests, yields plunged. Wheat, neglected, grew in even shorter supply. Bread lines sprouted furiously.

In 1961 at the Twenty-Second Party Congress Khrushchev had promised true communism. Instead there was kukuruza. Russians could forgive many things, but the absence of wheat bread made them feel humiliated and angry. Wheat bread was symbolic, sacred. On induction into Komsomol, students were asked to name the price of bread. Woe to the politically retarded delinquent who blurted out “thirteen kopeks.” The correct answer: “Our Soviet bread is priceless.”

Capitalizing in part on this popular wrath, in October of 1964 a Kremlin clique forced Khrushchev from power. For a while papers talked about his “subjectivism” and “hare-brained scheming,” about the “lost decade.” Then they stopped mentioning him. A previously obscure apparatchik named Leonid Brezhnev, now general secretary, ushered the USSR into a new era. Stagnation, the era was later dubbed. The age of cynicism and “acquisitive socialism.” The age of bargains, contracts, and deals, of Brezhnev’s-eyebrows jokes and Lenin Centennial anecdotes—of empty store shelves and connivingly stuffed fridges.

The dissolution of my parents’ marriage mirrored Khrushchev’s fall.

A product of the Thaw Era, Mom still retains tender feelings toward Kukuruznik. But she can’t help blaming him and his corn and the breadlines for what happened with her and my father.

About a year before my mother’s troubles began, she sat at a pedsovet, the pedagogical council of School No. 112, District 5. Another meaningless “agitational” propaganda meeting was about to begin. Mother felt queasy. The odor of sulfuric acid, potassium hydroxide, and teenage stress hormones hung in the air. The classroom they gathered in belonged to Comrade Belkin, the puffy-faced science teacher and font of communist consciousness.

For these endless, poisonous meetings Mom was partially to blame. She had spoken up at her very first “agitational” session. Recently hired as the school’s progressive young English teacher, she’d been eager to flaunt her dissident stripes. It was still the Thaw. Sincerity was the buzzword. Solzhenitsyn’s anti-Stalinist One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich had just been published!

“Comrades!” my mother had begun in her best imitation Moscow Art Theater voice. “What have we actually learned from this meeting? Why have we sat here listening to Comrade Belkin read aloud the entire political section of Pravda? Aren’t piles of homework waiting? Don’t some of us have hungry kids to go home to?”

At the last sentence Mom’s oration trailed off. Nearing the Soviet grandmotherly age of thirty, she herself had no kid waiting hungrily. An ectopic pregnancy followed by barbaric Soviet gynecological care had left her in no shape to conceive, and “home” was a dumpy single room she shared with her husband and mother-in-law in a bleak communal apartment.

Tak tak tak. “So, so so,” said the troika: the Labor Union rep, the school’s Party functionary, and Citizen Edelkin, the principal. Tak tak tak; they tapped their pencils in unison. “Thanks for sharing your views, Comrade Frumkina.”

But the other teachers had been mesmerized by her words. Mom caught their grateful, admiring glances. Shortly afterward a sign had appeared in the principal’s office: FROM NOW ON: PROPAGANDA MEETINGS—COMPULSORY. The other teachers started avoiding my mother.

This new March session droned on and on. So much to discuss. Two Young Pioneers had been caught tying their scarlet scarves on a neighborhood cat. And what to do about Valya Maximova, the third-grader spied at gym class wearing a cross under her uniform? Confronted by responsible classmates, Valya had confessed: her babushka sometimes took her to church.

Valya’s teacher waved Exhibit A, the confiscated cross, on its neck string as if dangling a dead mouse by the tail.

“That pesky babushka,” said the science teacher Belkin in a loud whisper. “Under Stalin such types got twenty-five years.”

Stalin’s corpse had recently been evicted from Lenin’s mausoleum by Khrushchev, so as not to “corrupt” that noblest of cadavers. Invoking the pockmarked Georgian was uncool. But instead of protesting, everyone turned and peered at Larisa. Some weeks before, sacrificing her own Sunday, she’d taken her pupils to a cemetery, where innocent Pioneers had been exposed to crosses galore. She regarded it as a cultural lesson, a way of lifting the Soviet taboo around death for the kids.

“Some Young Pioneers report that during the trip you mentioned Jesus Christ.”

Edelkin pronounced this as if Valya’s religious babushka and Larisa were fellow opium pushers.

“Christianity is part of world culture,” Larisa protested.

Tak tak tak, went the troika.

Edelkin ended the meeting on an upbeat note. In the case of pupil Shurik Bogdanov there’d been serious progress. Poor Shurik Bogdanov—an A student, conscience of his class, and champion collector of scrap metal. Then he started getting Cs for “behavior.” His distraught mother stormed into Edelkin’s office and revealed the whole awful story: her husband had been cohabiting with a female colleague from his workplace. He intended to leave them. Poor young Shurik was traumatized.

“Could the Soviet school save a socialist family?” asked Edelkin with a dramatic flourish. Indeed, it could! The Party organization at Bogdanov père’s workplace had been contacted, a public meeting called. Shurik’s father and the female interloper had been instructed to cease their immoral cohabitation immediately.

“The father is now back in the family fold,” reported Edelkin, almost smirking with pride. Socialist values had triumphed. Would comrade teachers chip in for a bottle of Sovetskoye champagne for the couple?

Mom gasped for air as he finished. The chemical stench of the classroom, the intrusion of the kollektiv into some hapless comrade’s love life, the bleakness of her own situation… Next thing she knew, the entire pedagogical council was fanning her with pages of Pravda and splashing her with cologne. She had fainted.

That week the doctor confirmed the impossible: she had fainted because she was with child. The troika at school suggested that she needn’t bother to return after maternity leave.

My mother was pregnant, unemployed, and euphoric.

Mom remembers pregnancy as the happiest time of her life. She didn’t understand why most Soviet mamas-to-be hid their bellies in shame under layers of baggy rags. Even at eight months she waddled down the street as if floating on air—belly forward. Inside her was a girl, she was sure of this. It was the girl she’d been dreaming about ever since she herself was a schoolgirl. The girl she imagined playing the piano, painting watercolors, learning languages in foreign countries, and—who knows?—maybe even riding a shiny brown Arabian horse on some verdant British estate. It was the girl she intended to guard like a tigress from the counterfeit Soviet happiness, from that rotten, demoralizing split-consciousness, from toska, the anguished, alienated anxiety of her own Stalinist childhood.

Apparently Mom also wanted to shield me from Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin and Belka and Strelka, the adorable black and white mutts who flew into space. My mother hated the kosmos; that preposterous futuristic final frontier of Soviet imperialism. At age five I was forced to hide my profound crush on Yuri Gagarin from her and weep in secret when the smiley kosmonavt died in a plane crash at the age of thirty-four. But I’m grateful Mom didn’t name me Valentina, after Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. I look nothing like Valentina. Mom named me instead after one of her favorite poems by Anna Akhmatova.

“At baptism I was given a name—Anna, Sweetest of names for human lips or hearing.”

Anna, Annushka, Anya, Anechka, the irreverent An’ka. The peasant-vernacular Anyuta and Anyutochka, Nyura and Nyurochka. Or Anetta, in a self-consciously ironic Russified French. Or the lovely and formal Anna Sergeevna (my name and patronymic)—straight out of Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog.” The inexhaustible stream of diminutive permutations of Anna, each with its own subtle semiotics, rolled sweetly off my mother’s lips during pregnancy.

Her baby daydreams usually reached fever pitch in the food lines. Surrounded by disgruntled citizens muttering Khrushchev jokes, Mother drew up imaginary lists of the foods she would feed to her little Anyutik. Unattainable foods she knew only from her reading. Omar. Lobster. So noble-sounding, so foreign. Definitely pizza and pot-au-feu. And when the child was just old enough: Fleurie. Everyone swigged it in the novels of Hemingway, that most Russian of American writers. Yes, yes, definitely carafes of Fleurie, with snails dripping garlicky butter and parsley sauce. Followed by cakes from her beloved Proust. Madlenki, Mom called them in Russian, with the clumsy proprietary familiarity of someone who lived and breathed Proust but still thought madeleines were a species of jam-filled pirozhki.

Occasionally Mom would get lucky in the lines. She still talks of the day she victoriously lugged home five kilos—ten pounds—of vobla to last her the entire final trimester. Have I mentioned vobla before? It’s the rock-hard, salt-encrusted dried Caspian roach fish. Rock-hard vobla sustained Russians through the revolutionary teens and twenties, the terrible thirties, the war-torn forties, the liberating fifties, and the rollicking sixties—until the Caspian was so depleted that in the stagnant seventies of my childhood vobla became a sought-after delicacy. Vobla brings out that particular Russian masochism; we love it because it’s such a torment to eat. There’s the violent whacking against a table to loosen the skin, followed by the furious yanking of the petrified leathery flesh off the skeleton. There’s self-inflicted violence, too—a broken tooth here, a punctured gum there—all to savor that pungently salty, leathery strip of Soviet umami. Vobla was the last thing my mother ate before being rushed to Birthing House No. 4. This might explain why I’d happily trade all Hemingway’s snails and Proust’s cakes for a strip of petrified fish flesh.

From Birthing House No. 4 Mom brought home a jaundice-yellowed infant swaddled tight as a mummy into totalitarian submission. Awaiting her were the glories of Soviet socialist motherhood. Cribs as elegant as a beet harvester. Pacifiers made of industrial rubber you sterilized in a water bath for two hours while you hand-copied the entire volume of samizdat Dr. Spock. And pelyonki (diapers), twenty per day per Soviet child—not including nine flannel over-diapers, and a mountain of under-diapers fashioned from surgical gauze.

These scores of diapers couldn’t simply be bought at a store. In an economy where every shred and scrap was recycled, all twenty pelyonki were made at home, by cutting up and hand-hemming old sheets. During the day Mom soaked them in cold water with suds from a brown smelly soap bar she grated until her knuckles bled. At night she scalded them in a four-gallon bucket on the stove of a communal apartment kitchen lacking hot water, then rinsed all twenty under an icy stream from the rusted communal tap until her arms were falling-off frozen. The weight of maternal love came down on me with full force when I learned that each morning she then ironed the twenty pelyonki. Mom claims that she loved me so much, she didn’t mind the diaper routine, which I guess makes her a Soviet martyr to Motherhood. After she told me about it, I went to bed lamenting what a burden I’d been, being born.

This was Dad’s sentiment, too.

Initially he rather enjoyed Soviet fatherhood. He helped with the pelyonki. Stood in breadlines after work. Arrived home “tired but joyful,” to use a cherished socialist-realist cliché, with heavy, doughy bricks of rye inside his string bag. Together he and Mom bathed me in a zinc tub, adding disinfectant drops that tinted the water pink. But after three months, this life no longer seemed so rosy and pink to Dad. One night he didn’t come home. Mom spent sleepless hours running to the single black telephone of the entire communal apartment at the far end of the endless unheated hallway. The phone was silent, as silent as the alkogolik Tsaritsin passed out by the kitchen. In the morning Mother put on the seductive lilac robe with tiny white checks, a gift from Clara, her American aunt, and she waited. She waited long enough to read me the entire volume of Mother Goose in both Russian and English. (Humpty Dumpty translates as “Shaltai Baltai,” in case you’re curious.)

A murky February dusk had already descended when Sergei returned. He had hangover breath and a look of aggressive guilt. It didn’t make sense, him having a family, he announced from the threshold. “This whole baby business…” He let it go at that. He had no real means to provide for the family, no energy to endure the breadlines, no real desire. He yanked off a quilted blanket covering the folding cot in the corner. Slowly, demonstratively, he unfolded the cot a safe distance from the marital bed and fell asleep right away. Mom says that he snored.

On occasion Sergei would come home after work, and reenter my mother’s bed. Or sleep on the cot. Often he wouldn’t come home for weeks. He never bathed me anymore but from time to time he’d pick me up and make goo-goo eyes. Mom’s life went on—a wrenching, demoralizing limbo that left her will broken and her heart always aching. In her wildest, most daring fantasies Larisa hoped for one thing now: a half-basement room of her own where she and I would have tea from colorful folkloric cups she’d once seen at a farm market. Happiness to her was those cups, those artisanal cups of her own.

Mom’s purgatory lasted three years.

By the standards of the massive and perpetual housing crisis that pushed half the Soviet population into far more suffocating arrangements than ours, three years was a virtual fortnight. Anna Akhmatova, my genius namesake, was brought into a communal apartment at the Fountain House (formerly Sheremetev Palace) in Leningrad by her longtime lover, Nikolai Punin. His ex-wife lived with them. After the lovers’ breakup, both Akhmatova and the ex-wife remained in the flat, with nowhere to go, while Punin brought home new lovers. Following Punin’s arrest, Akhmatova continued to shuffle through a series of rooms at the same apartment (which now houses a tenderly curated museum). Memoirists recall how she and her ex-lover’s ex-family all sat at the dinner table, not talking. When Akhmatova’s son came back from the gulag he slept on a sunduk (trunk) in the hallway. At the Fountain House Akhmatova spent almost thirty years.

I too slept on a sunduk in the drafty hallway of my grandparents’ Arbat apartment when, in despair, Mom would run back to Naum and Liza. It was the same blue lightweight trunk that during the war saved Liza’s family from starvation. My grandparents’ two tiny rooms were already overcrowded with Mom’s brother and my three-year-old cousin, whose mother had her own marital difficulties. So Mom slept on a cot in the kitchen or next to me in the hallway. In the archaeology of Soviet domestic artifacts, the raskladushka—a lightweight aluminum and khaki tarp folding cot on which entire lives had been spent—ranks, perhaps, as the most heartbreaking and the most metaphoric. It also damaged millions of backs.

My mother was fortunate to have her marriage collapse in 1964.

In the late fifties, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, best known for epic symphonies, scored Moskva, Cheryomushki, a rollicking operetta pastiche satirizing the housing shortage. In 1962 it was turned into a film. Sasha and Masha, its young protagonists, have a marital crisis that is the inverse of my parents’ mess: they’re recently wed but forced by the dreaded “housing issue” to live apart, each with his or her family. My favorite bit is the campy Technicolor dream sequence when Sasha and Masha go waltzing through their imaginary new digs—private digs!—singing “Our hallway, our window, our coat hanger… Nashe, nashe, nashe: ours ours ours.” In the film’s socialist Hollywood ending, corrupt housing officials taste defeat and the lovers finally nest in their ugly new prefab flat—nashe nashe!—in the Cheryomushki district.

Cheryomushki in southwestern Moscow was, in fact, quite real, the country’s first mass development of private apartments. Similar housing blocks went shooting up in the sprawl of other outlying mikrorayoni (micro-districts). They were the Bald One’s low-cost revision of the Soviet domestic fairy tale: an escape from the hell of forced communality. At long last the nuclear family had a promise of privacy.

It’s hard to overestimate the shift in consciousness and social relations brought about by this upsurge of new housing. Initiated by Khrushchev in the late fifties, the construction continued well beyond him, into the eighties. It was the country’s biggest lifestyle transformation since the 1917 revolution, and represented probably the Bald One’s greatest social achievement.

By 1964 close to half the population—almost 100 million people—had moved into the new, bare-bones units slapped up quick and shoddy from prefab concrete panels. Soviet stats boasted that the USSR was churning out more apartments per year than the USA, England, France, West Germany, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland combined. Who doesn’t remember those endless housewarming bashes where we sat on the floor and ate herring off a newspaper, garnished with enticing whiffs of wallpaper glue? The prefabs put an end to the era of ornate, lofty-ceilinged, elite Stalinist housing. No longer just for nomenklatura and Stakhanovites, material well-being (such as it was) was now touted as a birthright for all. Khrushchev wanted to offer us a preview of the promise of full communism, shining bright just beyond Mature Socialism. And like Iosif Vissarionovich before him, Nikita Sergeevich bothered with the details. The Mustachioed One sniffed the soap. The Bald One tested and approved the standardized unitaz (toilet).

It was not large, this unitaz. Private dwellings were in no way meant to provoke bourgeois aspirations or rampant individualism. The vernacular name for the new prefabs, after all, was khrushcheba, a contraction of Khrushchev and truscheba (slum). What’s more, the new egalitarian residential spirit expressed itself in crushing architectural uniformity. Boxlike elevatorless blocks, usually five stories high, held multiple tiny dvushki (two-roomers). Ceiling height: two and a half meters. Living room: fourteen square meters. Bedroom: always the same eight square meters. For cooking, eating, talking, guzzling vodka, sipping tea, chain-smoking, doing homework, telling political jokes, playing the seven-string Russian guitar, and generally expressing yourself, the now-legendary “five-metrovki”—shorthand for the minuscule fifty-square-feet kitchens—fondly remembered later as incubators of free speech and dissent. The expression “kitchen dissident” entered the lexicon from here. Dissidence was an unintended but profound consequence of Khrushchev’s housing reforms.

The unrelenting sameness of the khrushchebas weighed heavily on the Soviet soul. “Depressing, identical apartment buildings,” wrote Alexander Galich, a well-known bard and singer of the time, forced into exile. “With identical roofs, windows, and entrances, identical official slogans posted on holidays, and identical obscenities scratched into the walls with nails and pencils. And these identical houses stand on identical streets with identical names: Communist Street, Trade Union Street, Peace Street, the Prospect of Cosmonauts, and the Prospect or Plaza of Lenin.”

Most of the above applied to the long-awaited new home we finally moved into in 1966. With a couple of major exceptions. Our street was called Davydkovskaya, not Lenin, Engels, Marx, or, God forbid, Mom’s dreaded Gagarin. Full address: Davydkovskaya, House 3, Fraction 1, Structure 7. At first, yes, Mom and I wandered forever trying to find it among identical blocks surrounded by pools of mud. But the neighborhood—Davydkovo, part of the Kuntsevo district—wasn’t depressing. It was rather charming, in fact. A former village in the western reaches of Moscow, it was a twenty-minute drive from the Kremlin along a wide, arrow-straight road. In former times Davydkovo was known for its bracing air and for the nightingales that sang from the banks of a fast-moving, shallow river called Setun’. A short walk from our Khrushchev slum rose a beautiful forest of fragrant tall pines. The pines shaded a massive green fence surrounding the closed-up dacha of a certain short, pockmarked Georgian, deceased for over a decade and rarely mentioned.

Mom swears we owed our khrushcheba joy to a ring and a miracle. It all began with a whisper—someone, somewhere, tipping her off to a waiting list for apartments that moved surprisingly swiftly. But there was a catch: the flat was a co-op requiring a major down payment. Which is where the ring and supposed miracle enter the picture. An art nouveau folly of dark-yellow gold in the shape of a graceful diamond-studded bouquet, the band was a post-war present to Liza from Naum, celebrating their survival. Babushka Liza lacked bourgeois instincts; I’ve always admired that about her. Having worn the ring once or twice, she tossed it into her sewing box. She was mending socks when Mom told her about the impossible down payment. The ring—so Mother swears—glinted at Liza with magical force. Miraculously a buyer materialized, offering the very seven hundred rubles (six monthly salaries) needed for the down payment. The entire family took it as an omen, and nobody was upset when they later learned that the ring was worth at least five times that price.

And so, here we were.

Our sauerkraut fermented under a wooden weight in our very own enameled bucket on our mini-balcony. From our windows hung our curtains, sewn by Mom from cheapo plaid beige and brown linen. Our shoe-box-size fridge, which Boris, the drunken plumber, had affixed to a wall because there was no space in the kitchen. The fridge beckoned like a private hanging garden of Babylon. Falling asleep every night in the privacy of her own four walls, my mother felt… Well, she felt she was still living in a Bolshevik communal utopia.

Our walls were cardboard khruscheba walls. Ukrainian Yulia next door wailed at her husband’s philandering. Prim Andrei upstairs rehearsed plaintive double bass passages from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony to the guttural ostinato of Uzbek arguments on the ground floor. The worst tormentors, Colonel Shvirkin and his chignoned wife, Nina, were quiet as mice, but such unacceptably paradisiacal smells of fried baby hen wafted from their kitchen that the entire building wanted to collectively lynch them.

My mother couldn’t afford baby hens. After several years of maternity leave she still refused to rejoin the workforce. Relatives chided her, but she insisted she had to spend every second with her little Anyutik. And so we lived essentially on Dad’s forty-five-ruble alimony, less than half of the pitiful Soviet monthly wage. Occasionally Mom added a pittance by giving an English lesson to Suren, an Armenian youth with fuzz on his lip and a melon-bosomed mother with fuzz on her lip. “Larisa Naumovna! I understood everything!” Suren would bleat. “Except this one strange word everywhere. T-k-he?” Which is the Russian pronunciation of the.

After utilities and transportation, Mother had thirty rubles left for food. Nowadays she recounts our ruble-a-day diet with glee. It’s the same girlish giddiness that lights up her face whenever she describes cleaning houses for a living in our first year in America. In those early dissident days, poverty—or I should rather say pauperism—carried an air of romance, of defiance.

One Soviet ruble comprising one hundred kopeks; that crumpled beige note with a hammer and sickle encircled by an extravagant wheat wreath. Mom spent it wisely.

“Not too rotten please, please,” she beseeched the pug-faced anti-Semite Baba Manya, at the dereviashka (“a little wooden one”), our basement vegetable store with its achingly familiar reek of Soviet decay. A discolored cabbage there set you back eight kopeks; likewise a kilo of carrots. The potatoes were equally cheap and unwholesome. Mom filled our general grocery needs at the stekliashka (“a little glass one”), a generic nickname for glass and concrete sixties service constructions. The store lay across a scrappy ravine. On her way she nervously fingered her change. Thirty kopeks for a liter of milk, she was calculating, and a fifteen-kopek refund for the bottle. Thirty-two kopeks for ten eggs, three of them usually broken, which could last us a week.

A few coins remained for animal proteins from a store invitingly named the Home Kitchen. This was a lopsided wooden hut left over from Davydkovo’s past as a village, a dystopian apparition that sat teetering in a garbage-strewn field. Whichever direction you came from you trudged through the garbage. It was like going into combat. Tall rubber boots; iodine in Mom’s pocket in case a rusted can slashed through my footwear. In winter, alcoholics “graffitied” the snow around the Home Kitchen with piss, spelling out the word khui (dick). Just so you know: pissing letters while under the influence requires great skill.

At the Home Kitchen, Mom handed over twenty-four kopeks for 125 grams of “goulash” meat. The store also carried kotleti with a meat-to-filler ratio that recalled another Khrushchev-era joke. “Where does the Bald One hide all the bread? Inside the kotleti.” Mom didn’t buy them; we were poor but proud.

In our own five-meter home kitchen I assigned myself the task of inspecting the goulash and alerting Mom to its blemishes. The multicolored universe of imperfections contained in a single chunk of beef was endlessly fascinating to me. If the beef had been frozen, refrozen, and thawed again, the crosscuts offered an eye-pleasing contrast of bloody purple and gray. Sinew and fat practically shimmered with an ivory palette. The bluish spots on beef that had sat around for too long acquired a metallic glow; if the light hit them right you could see an actual rainbow. And the seal—how I loved the bright violet State seal of “freshness” stamped on some lumps of flesh.

Trimming away imperfections reduced the four-ounce beef package by half, but Mom was resourceful. Perched on a white stool, I watched her slowly turn the handle of the awkward hand-cranked meat grinder she screwed onto the windowsill. My heart went out to her. In other families fixing the meat grinder in place was the husband’s job. Mom’s always wobbled in that defenseless feminine way. More often than not she ground the goulash with onions and bread into frikadelki, tiny meatballs she’d then float in a broth fortified by a naked soup bone. When a romantic mood struck her, she’d add cabbage and call the soup pot-au-feu, explaining how she’d read about this dish in Goethe. I rather preferred this Weimar pot-au-feu to the stew she prepared with the goulash and a frozen block of guvetch, the vitamin-rich vegetable mélange from Socialist Bulgaria with a slimy intervention of okra. I harbored a deep mistrust of Socialist Bulgaria.

On Sundays Mom invariably ran out of money, which is when she cracked eggs into the skillet over cubes of fried black sourdough bread. It was, I think, the most delicious and eloquent expression of pauperism.

We were happy together, Mom and I, inside our private idyll, so un-Soviet and intimate. She saved her kopeks to leave lovely, useless gifts on my bed every few days. A volume of Goethe’s Faust in a purple binding, for instance. (I was four years old.) Or a clunky weaving loom, which I never once used. For my fifth birthday, there was a recording, in Russian, of Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose. It was just the two of us celebrating. Mom splurged and made roast duck stuffed with sauerkraut. She turned off the light, lit the candles, put on the record. A heartbreaking voice droned: “The Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn… and a fierce pang of pain shot through her. Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death.”

By the end of it I was hiccupping with birthday sobs.

I too lavished my mother with presents, usually paintings that tactfully avoided Soviet themes: nothing with a CCCP logo, no Yuri Gagarin grinning from his space helmet. I wasn’t so blatant as my friend Kiril, whose entire painterly opus revolved around desirable East German toy railway sets. My artworks were subtler. I specialized in princesses, generic but always modeling feminine imported outfits and outsize nylon bows in their braids. My antimaterialist mom didn’t budge. She continued to dress me in shabby boy’s clothes and cut my hair in the shape of a bowl. She thought this looked charming.

“My Anyuta!” she’d coo to her friends. “Doesn’t she look just like Christopher Robin from my beloved E. H. Shepard illustrations?”

In my mind I devised excruciating tortures for Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh, but I didn’t hold anything against Mom. As I said, we were happy together, basking in mutual adulation like besotted newlyweds in our khruscheba nest. Until Mom’s compulsive hospitality syndrome went and interfered.

The mud outside had dried, and fragrant May breezes rattled the skinny apple trees below our third-floor window when Oksana and Petya showed up on our doorstep.

Mom spotted them in the goulash line at the Home Kitchen and liked them immediately. She’d never seen them before, but overhearing their conversation filled her with compassion. The pair was temporarily homeless and intended to spend the night in the train station. Mom swiftly offered our house.

The doorbell rang the next day. There stood a man with a droopy mustache and bluish circles under his eyes. His entire lower half was obscured by a vast Saint Bernard.

“Meet Rex,” said Petya. “Go ahead, hug him hello.”

It was like an invitation to cuddle a delivery truck. Overwhelmed by the dog, I hadn’t noticed the boy lurking behind Petya. He was a pudgy teenager with a gloomy expression, a sickly complexion, and arms weighed down by two cages. The bigger cage contained a white owl. Inside the second cage, mice, also white, scurried and squeaked. “Oleg,” said the gloomy boy. I couldn’t tell whether it was his name or the owl’s. “Don’t be afraid of the mice,” he said reassuringly. “Oleg will soon eat them.”

Plodding steps on the concrete staircase below announced Oksana’s arrival. She was out of breath and disheveled, a Jewish beauty with cascades of frizzy black hair falling wildly over a large glass box she hugged in her arms. “A terrarium,” she panted. “Ever seen a real terrarium?” I had, at the Moscow Zoological Park. But never a python slithering this close to my face. Igor, the serpent was called. Oleg and Igor, as if from a medieval Slavic epic.

“Igor and Oleg eat the same mice,” announced the boy, suddenly smiling.

Gogol’s play Inspector General ends with a famous silent tableau called the “mute scene.” At the news of the arrival of the real inspector general, the entire cast freezes in horror. This was approximately how Mom greeted the unexpected menagerie.

“You… you didn’t mention you had a, um, son,” was all she could muster.

“Who, him? It’s Oksana’s bastard,” replied Petya, with a jovial wink.

For the following five months, living arrangements in our two-roomer were as follows: The gloomy youth lived on a cot in the five-meter kitchen. Big Rex, as the largest and most pedigreed member of our strange kollektiv, had the run of the premises, sometimes leaping onto the lightweight aluminum cot in my room where Mom now slept. For fear of being crushed by the canine truck, Mother stopped sleeping. Or perhaps she didn’t sleep because Oksana and Petya, taking after their owl, led a mysterious nocturnal lifestyle. Most of the day they dozed away on Mom’s ex-bed in the living room. At night they rumbled in and out of the kitchen, brewing tea and cursing when they bumped against the teenager’s cot. “Their tea,” as Mom called their brew, contained an entire packet of loose Georgian tea leaves for one mug of hot water.

My innocent mom. She had no idea that this was the hallucinogenic chifir that got inmates high in the gulags. She didn’t know either that the grassy-sweet smell that now mingled in our apartment with the animal odors was anasha, a Central Asian hashish. Violent arguments followed the couple’s intake of anasha and chifir. The whole building quaked from the pounding of neighbors on our walls, floor, and ceiling. The couple and the owl took turns disturbing the sleep of hardworking socialist households. The owl’s guttural screeching curdled the blood.

But the biggest dilemma was getting in and out of the house. Because Igor the serpent lived in the hallway. Anyone entering and exiting was treated to the sight of a python devouring albino mice procured by the youth from Medical Institute No. 2, where Oksana’s cousin worked in a lab. I spent most of the five months barricaded inside my room. The only person who still visited us was the double bassist upstairs; he enjoyed borrowing Igor to frighten his mother-in-law. Baba Alla, my grandmother, schlepped her bags of chicken and other tasty tokens of grandmotherly love all the way to Davydkovo and left them down on the doorstep. Usually Rex ate the chicken.

It was Dad who finally ended all this. He missed having a family. Hinted that if Mom cleared the coast, he’d come stay, at least on weekends. My father was, and would remain, my mother’s only true love. Oksana, Petya, Rex, Igor, Oleg, and the gloomy boy were exiled immediately, a sullen departing procession of people and cages and four thudding paws leaving behind a stench of zoo and hashish. Every flat surface of our brand-new dwelling space was scarred by burn rings from their kettle. I now acquired a semi-father in place of a python and an owl, one who delivered high-quality weekend offerings from a store called Dieta, a prestigious purveyor of cholesterol-laden items meant for the young and the infirm. Every Friday evening I listened impatiently for the turn of Dad’s key in the door, leaping into the hallway to greet Dieta’s buttermilk jellies and rich, crumbly cheese sticks. Recently Mom asked me whether I ever felt my father’s abandonment. Flashing back to the cheese sticks and especially to the white, quivery, scallop-edged jellies, I had to say no.

Mom and I never did recover our intimate idyll. In 1961 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR had passed a law branding as “parasites” any citizens who refused to engage in socially meaningful labor. Punishment: up to five years of exile or internment in camps. The law acquired some notoriety in the West in connection with Joseph Brodsky, the dissident poet convicted of parasitism and forced into international exile. Although she was still technically married, with a young child, and thus exempt from the law, Mom felt afraid and uneasy about not working. And so finally, on a brittle December day in 1968 when I was five years old, she reengaged in socially meaningful labor. She began a job teaching English at the Ministry of Merchant Marines, and I went to my very first Soviet kindergarten. I don’t remember all that much of the place, only that it was located across desolate train tracks from our khrushcheba, and that on my first morning there I soiled myself, I guess from separation anxiety, and for the entire day nobody attended to me. Mother discovered my shame on the way home. I still retain an image of her crying on the train tracks.

It never got any better. My fellow kindergarten inmates began falling ill from the spoiled meat in the borscht. Then on the bus Mother overheard my teacher instruct a younger colleague on how to reduce class sizes: “Open the windows—wide.” It was minus thirty degrees outside, and gusting.

Reluctantly, Mom turned to her father.

By the time I knew him, Colonel Naum Solomonovich Frumkin, my granddad the spy, looked nothing like the dapper, dark-eyed charmer we met in the 1940s chapter. Now long retired, Dedushka Naum had scant hair and heavy black-framed eyeglasses, and did morning calisthenics to patriotic songs. And he bellowed—he bellowed all day.

“I SALUTE YOU AND I CONGRATULATE YOU!!!!” he would thunder into the phone. “My dear, esteemed Comrade… [insert name of appropriate admiral of Soviet fleet].”

It amazed me how Granddad always found reasons to congratulate somebody—until I discovered the squat tear-off calendar he kept by the phone. Each new page announced a fresh, bright Soviet day, a new joyous occasion. Aviation Day, Baltic Fleet Day, Transport Policeman’s Day, Tank Driver’s Day, Submarine Officer’s Day. And let’s not forget the all-out lollapalooza of Victory Day on May 9, which Granddad began observing with his customary barrage of salutations in April.

The bombastic Brezhnev-era myth of the Great Patriotic War and its cult of the veteran animated Dedushka’s retirement. When he wasn’t shouting felicitations, he was bustling about on some all-important veterans’ business. Much of this bustle involved Richard Sorge, the half-German, half-Russian master spy we left two chapters ago, betrayed by Stalin, hanged in Tokyo, and long since forgotten—until a fluke led to his miraculous resurrection. In the early sixties the French made a feature film about Sorge’s story and tried to sell it to Russia. The Soviet Ministry of Culture deemed the whole thing a malicious falsification, but Khrushchev’s bodyguard tipped his boss off to the film. The Bald One demanded a screening.

“This is how all art should be made!” pronounced the excited Khrushchev when the lights came up. “Even though it’s fiction, I was on the edge of my seat.”

“Um… Nikita Sergeevich,” he was told, “Sorge wasn’t, um, fiction, he was, um, actual.” Khrushchev instantly rang the KGB. They confirmed both Richard Sorge’s actuality and his intelligence record. Without further ado, Khrushchev anointed him a posthumous Hero of the Soviet Union and ordered that he be celebrated as Soviet Spy Number One.

Sorge books, Sorge scholars, long-lost Sorge relatives, Sorge films, Sorge buttons and postal stamps… Granddad was in the eye of this never-ending Sorgian typhoon. A few times I accompanied Dedushka Naum in his uniform and medals to his Sorge talks at rest homes or trade union concerts. Granddad was usually stuck on the entertainment program between an amateur folk songstress in a cornflower wreath wailing about the unrequited love of a factory girl, and, say, an amateur illusionist. People stayed for the cornflower lady, left to smoke when Naum came on, then returned to see the illusionist.

“Disgraceful! Nobody respects the veterans!” some bemedaled audience member would grumble. My palms would grow sweaty and my face would turn the color of summer tomatoes.

In approaching her father for help, Mother faced a moral dilemma. Despite only narrowly escaping arrest during the Purges—to say nothing of General Zhukov’s threat of execution for insubordination—Granddad remained an idealistic communist of the old Bolshevik school. Exploiting Party privileges for personal gain offended his principles; by nomenklatura (Communist elite) standards he and Grandma lived modestly. Mom’s principles were offended for different reasons. This was 1968, the year Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, crushing all liberalizing hopes in a consolidation of Brezhnevian might. The Thaw was well over. Mother’s anti-Soviet dissident zeal was at its peak, matching Granddad’s fervent loyalty to the system. So explosive was their relationship, so profound her disgust for the State Granddad represented, that she with her sister and brother even threw out his archives. Among the things lost was an autographed edition of Mao Zedong’s military writings and, yes, some significant Sorge memorabilia.

It goes without saying that Mother was loath to ask Granddad for any favors involving his Party blat (connections). But there was simply no other way to resolve my situation.

And so Mother swallowed her principles and pleaded with Granddad. He swallowed his principles and dialed a certain admiral’s phone number.

The next day I was enrolled at the kindergarten for the offspring of the Central Committee of the USSR.

Upon hearing that the kindergarten’s boarding setup meant I’d be staying over Monday to Friday, day and night, I shrieked with a five-year-old’s anguish. Mother herself looked ashen. She was relieved, yes, to save me from dysentery and pneumonia. But she would miss me crushingly.

And then there was the dreaded nomenklatura angle. The idea of a privileged Soviet caste and its coddled offspring enjoying politically incorrect delicacies was appalling to her. We spent half our lives queuing up for gristly goulash or tinned sprats. They dispatched their chauffeurs to “closed supply depots”—those unmarked warehouses that dispensed sevruga and sturgeon and tongue, and instant coffee, that most elusive of luxuries. Or at least we imagined so. In a society that guaranteed equality for all, the dining mores of the ruling elite were concealed from the rest of us. To Mother and her dissident intelligentsia friends, nomenklatura flavors fairly reeked of complicity.

“Shhh about the food at the kindergarten,” Mother warned me as we trudged through the snow. “And don’t learn any Lenin songs.”

The Central Committee kindergarten, boxy and light-bricked, sat behind a tall wire enclosure in the thick, dark, resinous Kuntsevo woods. Close by, hidden behind a sixteen-foot green wooden fence, brooded Stalin’s dacha. It was heavily guarded, mysterious, and had been locked up since he died there on March 5, 1953. Although the Brezhnev regime was making moves to rehabilitate him, in the popular imagination Stalin’s name remained fraught, a semi-taboo. The entire neighborhood knew nevertheless that the tall pines had been put there in 1933 on personal orders from the nature-loving Generalissimo. His orders had brought about the hills surrounding the forest, too—so uncharacteristic of pancake-flat Moscow. Did the dacha really have a secret underground bunker with a tunnel leading straight to the Kremlin? everyone wondered. Kerchiefed babushkas hawking potatoes on roadsides whispered to customers that he had been poisoned by the Jews. Local alcoholics, meanwhile, didn’t dare take their bottles into the woods, spooked by rumors of a restless mustachioed ghost, and by truer tales of uniformed comrades shooting at trespassers.

On the way to the kindergarten I wept uncontrollably, fearful of fences and ghosts (though secretly pleased, I admit, with the lyrical icicles that my tragic tears formed on my cheeks).

Inside, everything reeked of prosperity and just-baked pirozhki. The Lenin’s Corner was particularly resplendent, with its white gladioli arrangements beneath Ulyanov family photos arranged like icons on a crimson velvet bulletin board. On a panoramic veranda facing the haunted woods, nomenklatura offspring snoozed al fresco, bundled like piglets in goose-feather sleeping bags. I had arrived during Dead Hour, Soviet for afternoon nap.

“Wake up, Future Communists!” the teacher cried, clapping her hands. She grinned slyly. “It’s fish-fat time!” I thought she meant fish oil, a bane in a brown bottle administered daily at all kindergartens with cubes of salt-rubbed black bread. Instead, a towering nanny named, I still recall, Zoya Petrovna approached me with a vast spoon of black caviar in her hand. It was my first encounter with sevruga eggs. They smelled metallic and fishy, like a rusty doorknob.

“Open wide… a spoonful for Lenin,” the elephantine caretaker implored, pushing the spoon at my locked lips. “For Rodina—for the Party!” she wheedled, her voice rising, fish eggs glistening right under my nose. I started to gag.

“You little bedbug!” she bellowed. “Don’t you dare throw up! Or I’ll make you eat every drop of your puke!”

Between the two I chose caviar. But it didn’t seem like much of an improvement on vomit.

It soon became apparent that I wasn’t going to fit in, not at all. I had my estranged father’s non-Russian name; my baggy hand-me-down Romanian coat; my nausea, which was constant; and my antiestablishment mother, who recklessly tried to shield me from indoctrination by forbidding me to read the beloved Soviet children’s writer Arkady Gaidar or memorize Lenin hymns. I know Mother meant well, but really: what was she thinking, bringing me up as an ideological eyesore? Didn’t she know that in the USSR “happy” was, and always would remain, a mandatory modifier of “childhood”? That for a sad-eyed kid like me, the kindergarten had an official term: “non-friendly”—Soviet code for dangerously antisocial.

The intimate Proustian fantasies of my mother collided with the scarlet, trumpet-filled socialist epic of a shared Radiant Future, leaving me in a state of perpetual dazed alienation. My mom’s desire to keep me from ever experiencing her Soviet split-consciousness resulted in my developing my own, reverse case. At home I dared not confess to her that I’d memorized the Lenin songs, by accident, simply by dint of hearing them so many times at rehearsals. Even to myself I could scarcely admit my enchantment with the forbidden red universe populated by the happy grandchildren of Lenin. “Lenin is always with us,” I sang softly into my pillow at home on weekends, cringing from shame. “Lenin is always alive… In your each joyous day. Lenin is inside you, and inside me.”

“Anyutik, we don’t bring that gadost’ (muck) home,” Mom said curtly when she overheard me one time.

Every weeknight at kindergarten, I was, of course, gripped by the opposite longing. Not daring to make even a peep in the fearsome presence of Zoya Petrovna, I noiselessly hummed Mom’s favorite songs to myself. Like the Schubert one about Gretchen and her spinning wheel: “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy, I will find it never and never more…”

“On your right side—NOW! Arms straight, above the blanket!”

Like a sergeant inspecting her platoon, Zoya Petrovna surveyed the neat rows of beds in the dormitory to make sure we didn’t engage in any individualistic, anti-Soviet activity. Scratching, for instance, or getting up to go to the bathroom. The right side suited me fine. This way I could peer out the window at the lights of the brand-new nine-story apartment block twinkling in the night’s inky distance. The building was part of Brezhnev’s slight improvement on the khrushcheba model: nine or thirteen stories instead of five, plus elevators and garbage chutes. I lay quietly humming my songs, mentally visiting the cozily lit domestic worlds where mothers poured tea into orange polka-dot cups before kissing their daughters good night. The women of my imagination always had my mother’s short dark hair but not exactly her features. I stayed up for hours, counting and recounting the windows remaining illuminated. As each light was extinguished I felt a pang that gathered finally into a wave of lonely desolation when the building went altogether dark. The windows were lighthouses that shone to me from the world outside our tall wire fence.

In the mornings, more heartache. I didn’t care much for my peers, but there was a blond, straight-nosed boy with expressive blue eyes, Victor, whose dad, also named Victor, was a famous TV personality. I didn’t have the same heroic crush on little Victor as I had (furtively) on Yuri Gagarin. It was more like a sympathy, a bond of hidden mutual sadness. Victor and I barely spoke, but one time when I threw up and everyone teased me, he quickly touched my hair, to buck me up.

Victor had his own unfortunate issue: he wet his bed. In the morning, Zoya Petrovna would yank his blanket off and inspect the sheet, then tug him to his feet, pull down his white underpants, and drag him to the far end of the dormitory. She then lined up the rest of us to march past him. Each kid was instructed to slap the bed wetter’s bare bottom. “I hope you didn’t slap him,” Mom would say, horrified by the story. But what could I do? As my turn approached, my heart pounded. I could neither disobey Zoya Petrovna nor be among Victor’s abusers, as he stood there impassively, eyes glassy, with a strangely absent expression. I still remember my panic and the sight of his pale flesh as I mock raised my arm high, as if for a slap, then gently swiped my hand across his buttocks.

It astounded me how Victor could recover by breakfast and gleefully polish off his farina and tea. Me, I sat gagging at the white puddle of cereal on which squatted a cold yellow square of elite Vologda butter that refused to melt.

It was during mealtimes that my alienation gripped me most profoundly. My struggles worsened with each new politically indigestible, delicious morsel I desperately wanted to eat but knew would horrify Mother. I threw up. I contemplated going on hunger strike, like a Tatar dissident she’d told me about. Then a desperate inspiration came to me. Next to my table was a radiator, an old-fashioned ridged one with enough of a gap to the wall to fit a whole week’s worth of discarded provisions. And so, when no one was looking, I started dumping the Party elite delicacies behind it. First went the veal escalopes sauced with porcini mushrooms picked by our own young hands under fragrant Stalinist pines. Next, the macaroni, which unlike our coarse pasta at home was fine and white and lavished with gooey cheese imported from the glamorous (though occasionally not-so-friendly) homeland of Marshal Tito. Away went the prestigious cod liver pate, away went the wholesome, farm-fresh cottage cheese pudding with lingonberry kissel.

But the sweets served with our afternoon tea—those I couldn’t bring myself to dispose of. In our happy classless society, candies were the most brutally clear signifiers of status. Sticky proletarian toffees called Iris-Kis-Kis and rock-hard rust-hued delights known as Crayfish Tails tormented the fillings of the masses. Of higher status and available only sporadically were chocolates like Little Bears in the North, with a picture of white bears on ice-blue wrappers. Ah, what a romantic candy the northern bear was! It spoke of the Arctic expanses our Soviet explorers were yet to conquer. And then there were Chocolate Rabbits, those big green-foil-wrapped white elephants of the socialist defitsit economy. Priced at nine rubles a kilo (a tenth of the average monthly salary), rabbits were always available, and utterly scorned for being so. Only traffic cops, flush from bribes, famously moronic and devoid of all taste, were enthusiastic consumers of them. “Traffic cops buy their kids Chocolate Rabbits as payoff for forgetting to fetch them at kindergarten,” the saleslady in our local candy store used to say with a sneer.

Our kindergarten sweets were off this scale altogether. Like most Moscow candies, they were manufactured by the Red October Chocolate Factory, Mikoyan’s pet confectionary. Only recently have I learned that Red October produced two versions of the sweets: one for the People, the other for the Party. Nomenklatura chocolates had the same names—Squirrel, Red Poppy, Hail to October—and wrappers that looked the same as those on their proletarian doubles. But they possessed a vastly superior flavor thanks to exalted ingredients. As a kindergartner I had no idea about any of this. I did know that our candies, hefty in weight and wrapped smartly in classy matte paper, exuded power and privilege. Unable to eat—or toss—something so status-laden, let alone imagine sharing it with my friends outside the fence, I stashed the sweets inside my underwear bag.

My food dumping went well until a smell began to rise from behind the radiator. First it was a disagreeable whiff, then a noxious stench that caused everyone to scream foooo and bolt away from the wall. It was Zoya Petrovna who discovered my decomposed pile. Mother was immediately summoned, with me, to the director’s office. A small, sniffling woman, the kindergarten director had mothy hair pulled into a tight bun and the colorless Slavic features of a career apparatchik: in Mother’s mind doubtless a high-ranking KGB informant. She was formidable despite her size. Once she’d attacked a flasher who loitered by our fenced-off playground, pounding him with her sharp-edged handbag. The flasher fled with a genuinely terrified expression.

“Your child, Comrade Frum-kina,” commenced the director, enunciating mother’s Jewish surname with a meaningful curl of her lip, “your child doesn’t really belong to our kollektiv…” Was I being expelled from the Central Committee kindergarten? Was Mother going to lose her job—or worse? In a panic I rushed out to the dormitory and grabbed my precious underwear bag.

Mother brought me home on a sled, yanking it over the snow slopes with uncharacteristic aggression. I felt for her, a woman alone with no childcare. But then again, she had only herself to blame—raising me as a non-friendly kid, alienating me from the kollektiv—traumatizing my appetite with her dissident nonsense! Moodily, I pulled a candy out of my bag. It was called ananas. First I sucked on the crunchy chocolate shell, then slowly licked my way toward the center. The filling was so excruciatingly luscious with the synthetic-exotic flavor of pineapple, I shuddered. To mollify Mother, I decided to offer her the last remaining spectacular centimeter. I expected her to groan and topple into the snow, paralyzed with ecstasy and guilt by the taste. But she just absent-mindedly chewed and kept pulling the sled.

The following Monday I was back among the Georgian’s pines, gagging on caviar behind the tall wire kindergarten fence.

And Khrushchev? In his lonely, depressing retirement, he occupied himself with growing corn at his dacha.

_{CHAPTER SEVEN} 1970s: MAYONNAISE OF MY HOMELAND

“Where does Homeland begin?”

So wondered a popular croonful tune of the seventies performed in that saccharine Mature Socialist tone that instantly infantilized the listener.

“With a picture in your alphabet book?… That birch tree out in the fields?”

Russians of my mother’s age, who spent most of their living hours standing in line, might insist that Rodina (Homeland) began with avoska. From the word avos’—“with any luck”—this expandable mesh bag lay in wait in the pocket of every Russian, a stubborn handful of hope that defitsit Moroccan oranges or Baltic sprats might suddenly appear at some drab corner store. Our luck sack was a triumph of Soviet optimism and industrial strength. Inside the avoska you could practically fit a small tractor, and the sturdy cotton thread resisted even the sharp corners of the triangular milk cartons—yes, the blue and white leaky ones that dripped their accompaniment as you walked.

My generation, children of the Stagnation Era who now tend to dote on their Mature Socialist childhoods, might joke that Rodina began with their first black market jeans, or bootlegged Beatles LP. Or perhaps it began with the Young Pioneer parades where we sang Rodina songs, adding a nearly silent U in front of the R, which transformed the word into urodina: ugly hag.

That subversive hiccup before the R—this was the seventies. You could be disrespectful to Rodina and still enjoy four fun-filled August weeks at a Young Pioneers’ camp—paid for by the State.

I, of course, experienced no such regime-sponsored enjoyment. My cruel mother wouldn’t send me to camp, and she kept me home sick on that festive spring day in 1973 when our entire class was inducted into Young Pioneers. Never did I stand on Red Square making a five-finger salute to the clattering of drumbeats and the squawks of bugles. Never felt the garlicky breath of Vassa, our school’s Pioneer leader, as she fumbled with the knot of the scarlet tie around my neck. Never solemnly swore to “love Rodina, to live, learn, and struggle, as Lenin bequeathed, and as Communist Party teaches us.” Luckily, School 110 considered me a de facto Pioneer anyway and let me wear the tie, that small, sacred scrap of our Rodina’s banner.

As for where Rodina really began… Well, maybe it began, for all of us, with salat Olivier: with the colorful dice of cooked potatoes, carrots, pickles, hard-boiled eggs, peas, and some protein to taste, the lot smothered in a sharp, creamy dressing. Apparatchiks, impoverished pensioners, dissidents, tractor drivers, nuclear physicists—everyone across our eleven time zones relished salat Olivier, especially in the kitschy, mayonnaise-happy seventies. Borscht was banal; Uzbek pilaf or Georgian walnut chicken a little exotic, perhaps. But Olivier was just right, unfailingly festive and special on account of such defitsit items as canned Hungarian Globus-brand peas and tangy Soviet mayo, which was always in stores but never without a long line. Birthdays, engagements, dissertation-completion bashes, farewell parties for Jews who were emigrating (these sometimes felt like funeral wakes)—there was no special “table” without salat Olivier.

And who doesn’t remember big cut-crystal bowls of salat Olivier at New Year’s celebrations where families gathered in front of their television sets waiting for the Kremlin clock to strike twelve, and for Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev to adjust his reading glasses, rattle his medals, thunderously clear his throat, and then shuffle his papers in a desperate scramble to locate the first line of his New Year’s address?

The first line was always the same: “Dear Compatriots!”

Nowadays Mom and I must have at least a thousand various salad recipes in our collective repertoire. I like Thai and Catalan. Mom has perfected the simple green salad, possibly the hardest one of all to master. Hers has toasted pine nuts and chewy dried cranberries to punctuate a shallot vinaigrette veiling impeccable lettuce leaves. It’s as non-Russian as food ever gets. And salat Olivier? We don’t make it often, and never idly, careful not to disturb its aura of festiveness. A precious heirloom of our non-idyllic socialist pasts, the Olivier recipe gets pulled out from the memory drawer to commemorate a particular moment in life.

One day Mom decides that it’s time once again. Her sister, Yulia, is coming to visit from Moscow. We will throw a party and Olivier will anchor the appetizer spread.

I arrive to help with the cooking. Mother’s apartment, overheated as always, is permeated by the sweet, earthy smell of boiled root vegetables. In the dining nook off the kitchen, the potatoes and carrots sit, cooked in their skins—awaiting their transformation into salad. We peel, chop, chatter. As often happens in Mom’s dining nook, time and space begin to blend and compress. A taste of a Lebanese pickle that uncannily resembles a Russian gherkin leads to a snippet from a Rodina song, which in turn rouses a political morality tale, or reawakens a recollection of a long-ago dream, of a fleeting pang of yearning.

Piling potato, carrot, and pickle fragments into a bowl, I think that Olivier could be a metaphor for a Soviet émigré’s memory: urban legends and totalitarian myths, collective narratives and biographical facts, journeys home both real and imaginary—all loosely cemented with mayo.

We keep chopping, both now lost in our own thoughts.

I am seven when the grandest Olivier feast I can remember occurs. Tables are pushed together in a cavernous kitchen unevenly lit by greasy dangling bulbs. Potbellied men haul in chairs; women in splotched aprons dice and mince. A banquet is being prepared in a shared kitchen inside a long four-storied building on Kuybishev Lane, two minutes by foot from the Kremlin.

We’re in the kommunalka, the communal apartment into which I was born. Where I heard Misha the black marketeer puke out his delicacies; where Dad’s mother, Babushka Alla—Baballa, we call her—still lives; and where Mom spent three agonizing years after my birth until we moved out to Davydkovo.

We don’t live in Davydkovo anymore, by the way. Before my first school year, Dad decided that he did want a family full time—but only if we moved to the center of Moscow. In a bureaucracy-defying maneuver, Mom finagled a dwelling swap between herself and her parents. Naum and Liza moved to our apartment, where bracing walks awaited among Stalinist pines, and we took over their central two-room flat in the Arbat, only one metro stop away from Baballa’s kommunalka kitchen. Which is where we’re crowded this evening.

I visit Baballa here every weekend, often staying overnight in her dank, high-ceilinged room. On our sleepovers Grandma and I play cards and dine on no-fuss frozen dumplings followed by the “Snowhite” meringue torte she has toted home from the elite canteen at Gosstroy, the State Construction Committee where she earns a whopping 260 rubles a month. I’m in awe of Baballa: her swagger with vodka and billiards, her three-tiered slang, her still-sexy looks. She’s my playmate and role model, the one who pressured Mom to allow me to grow my hair long just like hers. Whenever construction workers whistle at her, I wink and whistle back proudly while she slanders the offenders in a voice roughened by a lifetime of Belomor cigarettes. Baballa is the world’s coolest granny. But her kommunalka simultaneously fascinates me and scares me so much, I get butterflies in my stomach each time I visit.

Bolshevism did away with private life, Walter Benjamin noted after his 1927 visit to Moscow. Describing a communal apartment, he wrote: “One steps through the hall door—and into a little town.” It’s a poignant image, Magrittian almost. Except that the “town” in Baballa’s apartment forty years later wasn’t that little: more than fifty people jammed into eighteen rooms situated along a long narrow hallway. Unheated, with water-stained walls and no lights—the bulb was perpetually stolen and bartered by the alkogolik Tsaritsin—the hallway was a canyon of terror and peril for me. There you could catch pneumonia, fracture an ankle stumbling over the passed-out body of the self-same Tsaritsin—or worse. The worst? The ghoulish figure of demented old Mari Vanna, who meandered about in her torn once-white nightgown with a chamber pot in her hands. If she was feeling frisky she’d tilt it toward your feet.

I won’t share details about the communal bathroom other than the fact that its three toilet cabins were separated by plywood, through which the peeper Vitalik liked to drill holes. Next to this peeper’s gallery lay the shared kitchen.

Please note that there is no word for “privacy” in Russian.

Fittingly, the kitchen of Baballa’s apartment constituted a multifunctional public space, abustle with all manner of meaningful collective activities. Here were some of its functions:

AGORA: Glorious news of overfulfilled Five-Year Plans blasts from the transistor radio suspended above the stove. Neighbors discuss grave political issues. “Motherfucking Jew-traitor Maya Spiro from room number six conspiring against the Soviet Union again.” MARKETPLACE: “Nataaaasha… Saaasha… Trade me an onion for half a cup of buckwheat?” BATHHOUSE: Over a kitchen sink women furtively rub black bread into their hair. Furtively, because while bread is believed to promote hair growth, it is also a sacred socialist treasure. Its misuse could be interpreted by other neighbors as unpatriotic. LEGAL CHAMBER: Comrades’ Court tries neighbors for offenses, including but not limited to neglecting to turn off the kitchen lights. A more serious crime: stealing soup meat from the pots of your neighbors. In Baballa’s rambling flat, the thief is a tiny, aristocratic-looking old lady whose mournful expression sometimes resolves into a beatific smile that seems glued to her face. To combat her theft, some neighbors hang skull-and-bones signs over their pots; others put padlocks on lids. LAUNDRY ROOM: As you enter the kitchen on a cold dark winter morning, half-frozen stockings swaying from clotheslines flagellate you in the face. Some neighbors get angry. The tall blond Vitalik grabs scissors and goes snip-snip-snip. If stockings were imported, a fistfight ensues. The communal apartment kitchen turns into an EXECUTION SQUARE.

People cooked, too, in communal kitchens; cooked greasy borscht, shchi, kotleti, and kasha. The petite fireball pensioner Valentina Petrovna, who babysat me sometimes, baked the world’s most amazing pirozhki, seemingly out of thin air. Misha’s mom, Baba Mila, fried succulent defitsit chicken tenders that Mother pilfered. Eating, however, was something neighbors did in the ideologically suspect privacy of their own rooms. In the entire memory of Baballa’s apartment, that salat Olivier feast was the only exception.

The occasion was joyous indeed, exceeding the apartment’s very bounds. A kitchen expansion on the floor above Baballa’s!

Inside that kitchen, a door led to a tiny, bare, four-square-meter space that had been for years occupied by an old lady we all called Auntie Niusha. Miniature and birdlike, with sunken eyes, a sweet disposition, and a pervasive odor of formaldehyde, Auntie Niusha loved her job as a morgue attendant, loved sharing inspirational stories about washing cadavers. One day Niusha herself left this world. Not because neighbors added ground glass to her food to acquire her room, as sometimes happened in other communal apartments. Oh no no no—truly and genuinely!—Auntie Niusha died of natural causes.

Her death, everyone hoped, would result in a much-needed kitchen expansion. The upravdom (the building’s manager) had other ideas. Although the apartment above Baballa’s was already dangerously overcrowded even by the nine-meters-per-person standard, the upravdom instantly registered a new tenant in Auntie Niusha’s room in exchange for a bribe. One evening people came home from work to find a notice from the Housing Committee. The next morning, it said, a new tenant would be claiming Auntie Niusha’s dwelling space.

“Fuck the upravdom’s mother!” screamed the Tatar janitor.

“Over my dead body,” howled the Jewish expert in Sino-Soviet relations.

And so, in a feat of passionate and—for once—genuine communality, the communal apartment above Baballa’s sprang into action. They performed their Stakhanovite labor in the night’s slumbering darkness, so as not to attract the attention of informers on other floors.

By morning the door and walls had been brought down and the rubble trucked off. The entire expanded kitchen floor had been repainted, the seams between the kitchen and Auntie Niusha’s former room sanded down and the space filled with kitchen furniture.

The kitchen was now four square meters larger. Not a trace of Niusha’s dwelling space remained.

The upravdom arrived bright and early with a new tenant. The tenant was dangling keys to Auntie Niusha’s room on a key ring shaped like Lenin’s profile.

“Bastards! Motherfucking traitors of Rodina!” roared the upravdom. “Where’s the room?!” He started kicking the wall in front of which Auntie Niusha’s room had stood.

Everyone went speechless with fear. It was after all illegal to alter a dwelling space. Only Octobrina stepped forward.

She was an exotic creature, this Octobrina. Of uncertain age, her fire-engine red hair always in rollers, her eyes wandering, her lips curled in a perpetual amorous smile. A not altogether unpleasant delusion possessed her. She was convinced both Stalin and Eisenhower were madly in love with her. “He sent me a cable to say ‘I miss you, my dove,’ ” she’d announce every morning in the line for a toilet. “Who—Stalin or Eisenhower?” the alkogolik Tsaritsin would mutter grumpily.

“Room? What room?” Octobrina said, staring innocently and lasciviously straight into the upravdom’s eyes. “Please leave, my dear, or I’ll telephone Comrade Stalin this minute.” It was a good thing she didn’t invoke Eisenhower. Or maybe she wasn’t so mad after all.

Stalin had been dead for almost two decades. Still, the upravdom stepped back and instinctively shuddered. Then he sucked in his cheeks with great force and let out a blistering spit. Against the kollektiv he was powerless. Anyway, bribes for rooms—that wasn’t exactly legal either.

That night the whole building threw a feast of celebration in the new kitchen. Herrings were whacked against the table to loosen their skins, then arranged on pristine sheets of fresh Pravda. Vodka flowed like the Don. Moonshine, too. In an act as communal as Auntie Niusha’s room demolition, all four floors contributed to the construction of the salat Olivier. The Georgian family produced bunches of scallions—improbably in the middle of winter—to lend the salad a summery twang. Neighbors carted in boiled potatoes and carrots and pickles; and they dipped generously into their stashes of canned crabmeat and Doctor’s Kolbasa. Special thanks went to our Misha, the food store manager with a proprietary attitude toward socialist property, for the defitsit peas and a whole case of mayonnaise. I can still picture Octobrina in her grime-fringed, formerly frilly housedress, piping mayonnaise flowers onto the salad with such abandon, you’d think both Joe and Ike were arriving for dinner. After a few bites of the Olivier salad I fell into a mayonnaise-lipped stupor.

I don’t recall the exact taste, to be honest, but I assume it was pretty fab.

Now, in Mom’s tiny kitchen in Queens, she doesn’t share my nostalgic glow. “Foo! I’ve never had salat Olivier so laden and clunky as the one at Baballa’s party,” she exclaims, still dicing the veggies into precise half-inch pieces for her more ethereal version. “Who mixes chicken, kolbasa, and crab?” Well, I can’t blame her for having less than tantalizing memories of Baballa’s apartment, where neighbors, straight to her face, called her yevreechka (“little kikette”).

Like every Russian, Mom maintains her own firm ideas of a perfectly composed Olivier. And as with most Soviet dishes, the recipe’s nuances expressed social belonging beyond one’s personal flavor preferences. Soviets felt this acutely in the Stagnation years under Brezhnev. On the surface, the propaganda machine continued to spin out its creaking myths of bountiful harvest and collective identity; beneath, society was splintering into distinct, often opposing milieus, subcultures, and tightly knit networks of friends, each with its own coded vocabulary, cultural references, and political mind-set—and, yes, recipes—that signaled how its members felt about the official discourse.

With salat Olivier, identity issues boiled down mainly to the choice of protein. Take for instance militant dissidents, the sort of folk who typed out samizdat and called Solzhenitsyn “Isayich” (note the extremely coded, Slavic vernacular use of the patronymic instead of first and last names). Such people often expressed their culinary nihilism and their disdain for Brezhnev-era corruption and consumer goods worship by eschewing meat, fish, or fowl altogether in their Olivier. At the other end of the spectrum, fancy boiled tongue signified access to Party shops; while Doctor’s Kolbasa, so idolized during the seventies, denoted a solidly blue-collar worldview. Mom’s version—I’d call it arty bohemian—featured delicate crabmeat, along with a nonconformist crunch of fresh cucumbers and apples to “freshen up” the Soviet taste of boiled vegetables.

But Mom’s suddenly not so sure about my homespun semiotics.

“Eh? Whatever,” she says with a shrug. “In the end didn’t all the versions just taste like mayo?”

So they did! They tasted of the tangy, loose-textured Soviet Provansal brand mayo, manufactured for the first time in 1936 and taste-tested and approved by Stalin himself. Initially scarce, Provansal began to lubricate Soviet consciousness in the late sixties and early seventies, which is when salat Olivier took center stage at the table.

Specifications of a totem: short, 250-gram, potbellied, and made of glass, with a tight-fitting lid. If, as Dostoyevsky supposedly said, all Russian literature comes out of Gogol’s story “The Overcoat,” then what Gogol’s garment was to nineteenth-century Russian culture, the Provansal mayonnaise jar was to the domestic practices of Mature Socialism.

Our Brezhnevian days, so “abundant,” “friendly,” and “happy,” were accompanied by a chronic and calamitous shortage of tara, the term for packaging and receptacles. Hence the deep bonds between people and their avoskas, into which salesladies would dump fish or meat—unwrapped, unless you brought along your own sheets of Pravda. Of this time too was the fetishistic adulation that comrades lavished on foreign-issue plastic bags—washing them tenderly with a fancy East German bath foam called Badoozan, hanging them to dry on the slipshod balcony, parading them at haute soirées the way modern fashionistas show off their Kelly bags.

Still, nothing matched the use—the reuse—value of the mayonnaise jar. I toted mayo jars full of nails, needles and threads, and other paraphernalia of socialist junior toil to my school “Labor” classes. Both my babushkas sprouted scallions from onion bulbs in mayonnaise jars. My drunken Uncle Sashka used them as a) spittoons, b) ashtrays, and c) drinking vessels at certain unlovely canteens from which thoughtless comrades had pilfered the vodka glasses. When spring came and the first flowers perfumed Moscow air with romance, gangly students carried mayonnaise jars filled with lilies of the valley to their sweethearts. (Being short and delicate, lilies of the valley—and violets, too—were unjustly ignored by the Soviet flower vase industry, which favored tall, pompous blooms like gladioli.) And which H. sovieticus, strapped for cash three days before payday, hadn’t stood in line to redeem a sackful of mayo jars for a handful of kopeks? Elaborate rituals sprang up around the act of glass redemption.

Finally, where would Soviet medicine be without this all-important receptacle?

COMRADES WOMEN, BRING YOUR PREGNANCY TEST SAMPLES IN MAYONNAISE JARS PREVIOUSLY SCALDED WITH BOILING WATER, instructed signs at gynecological clinics. And it wasn’t just pregnant women: anyone having a urinalysis—routinely required for most polyclinic visits—had to deliver their specimen in the container from the tangy Provansal mayonnaise.

My poor mom. She was forced to contribute half her meager salary to the Soviet mayonnaise industry. My affliction was the reason.

The trouble began when I was eight. My life had actually turned fairly rosy by then. I excelled in second-grade Spanish at School 110, which my mom had also attended. I devotedly practiced piano for my weekly lessons at the prestigious Moscow Conservatory prep school near our Arbat house. I even acted in Soviet films on the side, not that my celluloid career was anything glamorous. Mainly it involved perspiring for hours in thick makeup and polyester costumes from fashion-forward Poland while waiting for an inebriated cinematographer to be fished out of a drunk tank. On the elaborate period set of Tolstoy’s Childhood, however, the costumes were gauzy and gorgeous, and the cameraman was fairly sober. But there was another problem: the entire juvenile cast became disfigured by boils—caused, they said, by a viral mosquito gorging itself on young flesh within Ostankino TV Film Studios. The casting director herded the children to the Union of Cinematographers dermatologist. As the doc examined our boils, I decided to show him as well an oddly discolored patch on my right ankle that had been alarming Baballa.

The doctor sent me home with a note. On it was a single word, which sent Mom and Baballa rushing in past the bearded statue of Ilyich outside the Lenin Library.

“Scleroderma.”

I’m not sure exactly how the Soviet Medical Encyclopedia described it. But I do remember the conversation between Mom and Dr. Sharapova, Moscow’s most in-demand dermatologist, to whom she immediately hauled me.

Sharapova: “Is Anechka an only child?”

Mom: “Yes.”

Sharapova, in a treacly voice: “Larisa Naumovna! You are young. There will be other children.”

Mom didn’t want other children. Besides, her reproductive system had already been ravaged by socialist gynecology. So began our epic battle with scleroderma, which, it became quickly apparent, baffled and defied Soviet medics. Vitamin A and vitamin E; massage and physiotherapy; a ferociously expensive elite herbal goo called moomiyo used by Olympic athletes and cosmonauts; daily penicillin injections; weekly cortisone shots; mineral-rich mud from the gaudy and piratical Black Sea port of Odessa. All were deployed randomly, in hope of defeating this potentially fatal autoimmune disease—one that would most likely spread, so Mom was informed in whispers, from my leg to my vital internal organs, and shut them all down. We spent the next two years on a grinding merry-go-round of doctors, always clutching test samples in a trusted mayonnaise jar. While Mom endured yet more shrugs and compassionate frowns in their offices, I gaped at the public health posters in grimy hallways of dermatological clinics, which conveniently doubled as venereal wards.

Gnawed-away chins, crumbled noses, cauliflower-like growths—the syphilitic faces on those posters are still etched in my memory. Syphilis terrified me far more than my scleroderma, since nobody had informed me about the “fatal” part. About syphilis, however, I’d heard plenty from our homeroom teacher, a squat brunette with a clenched perm and a taste for corporal punishment. “Syphilis is contracted by sharing chewed gum and accepting sweets from foreigners,” she never tired of proclaiming. Guilty of both, every day I’d examine my face in the mirror for cauliflower-like buds. In the meantime, my scleroderma kept creeping up my left leg. When one day the doctor noticed a fresh spot on my other leg, Mom plonked into a chair and covered her face with both hands.

Mom’s other heartache was losing her friends.

Partly in response to Western pressure over human rights, partly to purge “Zionist elements,” the “compassionate” Soviet State began loosening the emigration quota for its Jews at the start of the seventies. By mid-decade about 100,000 had managed to leave. “Reuniting with family in Israel” was the official qualification. Some Soviet Jews genuinely headed for their “historic homeland.” The majority left on Israeli exit visas and then in Vienna, the first refugee transit point, declared their desire to immigrate elsewhere, to the New World mainly. These “dropouts” were carted on to Rome to await American refugee visas.

Citing my illness, and her visceral hatred of Rodina, Mom herself began contemplating the move at the end of 1973.

A vyzov (invitation petition) from a chimerical great-uncle in Israel had been already secured. The paper with its suggestive red seal sat in Mom’s underwear drawer as she pondered our future. Newspapers of the day freshly railed against the “Zionist aggressors” (the Yom Kippur War had just ended). We attended clandestine Hebrew classes and endless farewell open houses for departing friends, their flats stripped down to bare yellow-stained mattresses. People squatted atop packed suitcases. Cried, smoked, guzzled vodka from mismatched borrowed mugs, scooped salat Olivier straight from the bowl. We left these gatherings loaded with practical tips—for example, thoroughly lick the stamps for your exit visa petition—and tantalizing snippets of news of the already departed. Lida’s daughter was loving the kibbutz; Misha in Michigan had bought a used Pontiac, green with only two dents. At home I looked up Tella Veef and Sheekago on my globe as Mom weighed the pros and cons of Israel (honor) versus America (comfort, old friends, a renowned scleroderma expert).

I needed proper medical help. Dad evidently needed us out of his hair. He seemed bored once again with family life. “Da, da,” he’d agree, almost gleeful, whenever Mom brought up zagranitsa. “Go, I might join you later once you are settled.”

And yet Mother kept stalling—torn between the dead-end “here” and a future “there” that she couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Navsegda—forever. Emigrating without the right of return. It would be a kind of dying.

Our country’s tragic shortage of tara was what tipped Mom finally toward the OVIR, the State Office of Visas and Registrations.

A luxurious late-spring day in 1974. The monumentalist capital of our Socialist Rodina was veiled in the yellow-green leafy crochet of its birch trees. But inside our regular grocery store, nuclear winter reigned. Besides the familiar rot, a greenish-white slime adhered to the beets; strange mutant growths sprouted on the potatoes. Normally oblivious to such things, my mother stormed off without her usual makings of soup, holding back tears. At the Three Piglets corner shop, an even grimmer landscape awaited: the counter was bare, save for bloodied hunks of unidentifiable flesh.

“Udder and whalemeat!” barked the button-nosed salesgirl. Her scowl was like frostbite.

With two mouths to feed, Mom swallowed hard and asked for a half kilo of each, trying not to look at the crimson trails left on the scale. “Open your bag,” grunted the girl, shoving the purchase toward Mom. Mom informed her that she’d forgotten her avoska. Humbly, abjectly, she begged for some wrapping paper. “A newspaper, anything—I’ll pay you for it.”

“Citizen!” scolded the girl with her scowl. “You think everything in our country can be bought and sold?”

Whereupon Mom exploded with everything she thought about the udder and whale and the salesgirl’s scowl and our stinking bounteous Rodina. She took the meat anyway, bearing the lumps along home in her naked hands, forensic evidence of the State’s remorseless assault on her dignity.

I was just back from school, practicing “February” from Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons, when Mom stormed in. She summoned me to the kitchen.

Her hands were still bloody. The conversation was brief.

She had had it with the USSR, she announced. She was finally ready to apply for an exit visa—but only if that was my earnest desire as well.

“If you want to stay,” she said, “we will stay!”

Called away just like that from my Red October upright piano to pronounce on our entire future, I shrugged. “Okay, Mamulya,” I replied.

Zagranitsa would be an adventure, I added cheerily.

To be honest, I only feigned a chipper nonchalance to appease Mom.

Personally I had no reason to emigrate, and no bitter grievances with our Rodina. Even my sickness wasn’t that much of a drag, since the frightened doctors excused me from going to school whenever I wanted. I was now ten years of age, and my past as a sad-eyed bulimic was behind me. I was, at long last, enjoying a happy Mature Socialist childhood.

A couple of words about Mature Socialism.

My grandparents had idealistically embraced the regime, whereas the urban intelligentsia of my parents’ Thaw generation of the sixties rejected it with equal fervor. We, the kids of zastoi (Stagnation), experienced a different relation with Rodina. As the first Soviet generation to grow up without ruptures and traumas—no purges, no war, no cathartic de-Stalinization, with its idealizing of sincerity—we belonged to an age when even cats on the street recognized the State’s epic utopian project as farce. We, Brezhnev’s grandchildren, played klassiki (Russian hopscotch) on the ruins of idealism.

Happiness? Radiant Future?

In the cynical, consumerist seventies, these were embodied by the holy trinity of kvartira (apartment)-mashina (car)-dacha (country cottage). An imported sheepskin coat figured in too; so did blat, that all-enabling network of connection so scorned by Naum and Larisa. A popular Stagnation-era gag sums up what historians dub the Brezhnevian social contract. Six paradoxes of Mature Socialism: 1) There’s no unemployment, but no one works; 2) no one works, but productivity goes up; 3) productivity goes up, but stores are empty; 4) stores are empty, but fridges are full; 5) fridges are full, but no one is satisfied; 6) no one is satisfied, but everyone votes yes.

In return for the “yes” vote (at pseudoelections), the Kremlin gerontocracy kept commodity prices unchanged and guaranteed nominal social stability—steady employment that “pretended to pay” while comrades “pretended to work.” It also turned a semiblind eye to alternative economic and even cultural practices—as long as these didn’t blatantly violate official norms. As one scholar notes, by socialism’s twilight the only classes that took ideology at face value were professional Party activists and dissidents. They were an overwhelming minority. Everyone else eked out a daily life in the holes and crevices of the creaking machinery of power.

My own transformation from an alienated, shadow-eyed mess in my kindergarten days into a scheming, duplicitous junior Homo sovieticus occurred during Lenin’s jubilee year. In 1970 beloved Vladimir Ilyich was turning an immortal one hundred inside his mausoleum, and Rodina was celebrating with such unrelenting kitsch pomp, all the force-fed rejoicing produced the reverse effect on the popular psyche.

Having just moved to the Arbat, smack in the center of Moscow, we were besieged by a never-ending stream of tea-guzzlers. In the airy, multicornered kitchen that once belonged to my grandparents, people came and went, eating us out of the house—and treating us to a feast of jubilee jokes. The “commemorative Lenin products” series sent me into a paroxysm of private rejoicing. Items in the series:

My glee was so extravagant because my previous relations with Lenin had been so anguished. As Mom fought to exorcise him from my young mind, I furtively adored Ilyich at home, only to gag on him at the kindergarten, where Lenin-mania was crammed down my throat along with black caviar. The situation was tormenting, paralyzing; it had me throwing up almost daily. Until the populist carnival of jubilee humor liberated me from the schizophrenia of Lenin’s conflicting presence. Laughter magically shrank the whole business. Imagining Lenin’s squinty, beardy visage trapped inside a milk chocolate bonbon—instead of a raisin or cashew!—was somehow empowering. And how I delighted in seeing the local drunks slap a Lenin centennial ruble on a filthy liquor store counter, muttering: “My pocket ain’t no mausoleum. You ain’t lying around in there for long.”

As I grew older, the symbology of our Rodina began to resemble not a fixed ideological landscape but a veritable kaleidoscope of shifting meanings and resonances. By the time I was in third grade and seriously playing around with the various significations of my Young Pioneer tie, I’d made further peace with Soviet split-consciousness. Rather than a debilitating scourge, it seemed like a healthy Mature Socialist mind-set.

You didn’t embrace or reject Power, I’d realized: you engaged and negotiated.

At school I was also busy chasing after the most crucial Mature Socialist commodity: social prestige. I accomplished this by forging my own deep relationship with the mythical zagranitsa. We lived, after all, in a Moscow district swarming with embassy foreigners. Shamelessly I stalked their children. Sheyda from Ankara, my very first target, became my best friend and I enjoyed weekly sleepovers at the Turkish embassy on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street, the embassy row near my house. I got myself in, too, with Neema and Margaret, daughters of the ambassadors of Ghana and Sierra Leone, respectively. Ghana—what a world superpower! So I thought to myself, slipping past the dour guard and into a private elevator that deposited me right in the Ghanaian ambassador’s sumptuous living room.

My life as diplomatic socialite left me flush with prestigious imported goods. Ballpoint pens, Donald Duck stickers, Smarties, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit, and Turkish Mabel gum with a picture of a be-turbaned belle on a shimmery wrapper. Myself, I barely touched this stuff. Instead, in my own modest way I contributed to the massive Brezhnevian shadow economy. I sold, bartered, traded imports for services and favors. For three stale M&M’s, Pavlik, the most glamorous boy at my school, two years my senior, slavishly carried my knapsack for a week. With profits from selling Juicy Fruit in a girls’ bathroom at school, I treated myself to meals at House of Scholars, the elite Academy of Sciences clubhouse, where Mom sent me for dance lessons on Wednesdays. I skipped the silly ballet and made a beeline straight to the extravagantly marbled dining room. Once Mom came to pick me up early and the dance teacher reproachfully motioned her toward the restaurant. There I was, a proper black marketeer, at my regular corner table under a gilded mirror, enjoying a personal cocotte pan of wild mushroom “julienne.”

A romantically mysterious illness, social prestige, a thriving black market career—to say nothing of hopscotch on the ruins of an ideology. This is what my mother proposed to take me away from. But I loved her. And so for her sake I said an insincere Brezhnevian “yes” to her emigration plans.

In May 1974, Mom resigned from her job to avoid compromising her colleagues and handed her emigration papers to an OVIR clerk. The clerk was an anti-Semitic Slav with a luridly ironic surname: Israeleva.

Mom was not optimistic. The big problem was Naum—him and his fancy “intelligence worker” past. “You’ll never be allowed out!” thundered Dedushka, apoplectic at her announcement that she wanted to emigrate. He wasn’t bluffing. Applicants with far fewer “classified” relatives nevertheless joined the ranks of otkazniki (refuseniks), those bearded social outcasts (and dissident heroes) who were denied exit visas and thereafter led a blacklisted life with no work, no money, and a nonstop KGB tail. On the required “parents’ consent” form Mom had forged Naum’s signature; when asked to describe his job, she put down a vague “retired.”

I suppose OVIR was missing some teeth on its fine-toothed comb. In July, Mom and I came back from the polyclinic in the drenching rain to find Dad holding an opened OVIR envelope.

“September,” he blurted out. “They say you’re to leave by September!”

For once, Dad looked shaken. When the rain stopped he took me to an ugly, overlit shishkebab restaurant where a band blasted even at lunch. He told me not to forget him, to write. His unsardonic tone jolted me. Embarrassed by this sudden expression of fatherly sentiment, I silently wrestled with the tough, sinewy meat.

The next two months unfolded as a stagnant slog through red tape. How they tortured us pitiful would-be refugees! Lines to unregister from your “dwelling space,” lines to notarize every legal scrap of your former life. And the money! In a final stroke of extortion and humiliation, the State charged a huge tariff to relinquish Soviet citizenship. All told, emigration expenses amounted to the equivalent of two years’ salary. Mom scraped together the cash by selling art books sent by Marina, her school friend now in New York. This was a loan—she’d pay Marina back later in dollars.

Fra Angelico, Degas, Magritte: they financed our departure. “Imagine, Anyutik!” Mom would exclaim, lugging the high-priced volumes to a dusty secondhand book shop. “Soon—soon we will see the originals!”

The exit-visa process had transformed Mother, I noticed.

Anguished tears, sorrowful regrets—she wasn’t interested. Her vision of departure was not so much a sad, extended farewell as a curt removal; an amputation, surgical and painless, of her forty years as a citizen of our glorious Rodina. Amputation might even be too grand: maybe she regarded her past as a Soviet wart that would simply fall off. Or imagined a quick death by injection and a resurrection in another future and dimension, the unimaginable tam (there) where she’d felt she belonged ever since Lucien of Meknes held her hand during the International Youth Festival. Even I, the cynical black marketeer in the family, couldn’t fathom how a woman so delicate, who unfailingly wept at the exact same passage of War and Peace, and fainted—literally fainted—at my dad’s infidelities could show such resolve in so tragic a circumstance. I don’t think I saw Mother cry once.

This severing of the past included its physical remnants.

The spiteful Brezhnevian Rodina allowed us three suitcases per person. Mom took two tiny ones for the both of us: a semisvelte black vinyl number and a misshapen eyesore resembling a swollen, decaying brick. Studiously she ignored the detailed “to take” lists circulating among Jewish traitors to Rodina. Things for personal use; things to sell while at the transit points of Vienna and Rome. The latter included handcrafted linens, Zenit cameras, matryoshka dolls, and wind-up toy chickens that apparently enjoyed enthusiastic demand at flea markets in the Eternal City. Also hammer-and-sickle souvenirs, for which sentimental Italian communists forked over decent lire.

And generally: “Everything dear to you.”

Our mini-luggage held: one little blanket, two sets of cutlery, two bedding sets, two bowls with pink flowers made in Czechoslovakia, and by way of a “dear object,” one terra-cotta Georgian flower vase of massive ugliness. We owned barely any clothes, and no boots; I had outgrown mine, and Mother’s leaked badly. But she didn’t forget an empty mayonnaise jar—the tara for my urinalysis. What if they didn’t have suitable glassware at American clinics?

“Anything dear to you?” Mother asked.

I wasn’t sure.

There was my collection of imported chocolate wrappers that I groomed and smoothed out with my thumb and kept inside Giliarovsky’s Moscow and Muscovites. But why bother toting along these capitalist totems when I’d be residing where many, many more could be had? I adored Dedushka Naum’s clanky medals, but he’d never part with them, and neither would customs allow them through.

To my surprise, I thought of my reviled school uniform. Brown, thigh-length, woolen and scratchy, worn under a black pinafore. The dress was dry-cleaned once a year, if at all. But every week, in a domestic ritual replayed across each of our eleven time zones, Soviet moms unstitched the white lace collar and cuffs and sewed on fresh ones. My mother always did this on Monday nights, simultaneously stitching and chattering away on her black telefon. We’d sit in my parents’ room around the low three-legged Finnish table. Dad was usually gluing together the broken tape on his reel-to-reel magnitofon. I watched Vremya, the TV evening news. “Turn it down,” Mother would hiss as Donbas metallurgical workers dutifully overfulfilled Five-Year Plans, and rye sprouted lavishly in the Ukraine, and bushy-browed Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev locked in eternal embrace with bushy-cheeked Fidel.

The TV weather report, set to a bittersweet pop tune, would last an eternity. In Uzbekistan, a sunny twenty degrees centigrade. In Kamchatka, a snowstorm. Leningrad region, intermittent precipitation. Vast was our Socialist Rodina!

How could I ever confess to my parents that I felt secret pangs of pride at this vastness? That it stung me now, the thought of going to bed for the rest of my life not knowing if it was going to rain in the Urals?

I went into my room and unfolded my school uniform. It was too small. A new school year had just started but I, newly minted Zionist enemy, wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to my friends. I pressed the dress to my face, inhaling its institutional reek. I didn’t despise the smell as Mom did. From one pocket I fished out a fragment of Juicy Fruit in silvery foil. From another, my crumpled scarlet Young Pioneer tie.

Propelled by a sudden nostalgic patriotism I turned toward the door, ready to announce to Mom that I wanted to take the tie—but then stopped. Because I knew what she’d say.

Nyet, she’d say plainly.

Mom also said nyet to a farewell open house. And she wouldn’t allow relatives at the airport—only Sergei. The plan was to bid goodbye to close family at my grandparents’ house two nights before leaving and spend our last evening with Dad.

At our farewell dinner in Davydkovo, the Frumkin clan was in fine form. Babushka Liza had cooked her usual gloppy food for two days; Uncle Sashka got drunk, Aunt Yulia was late, and Dedushka Naum, well, he bellowed and he raged—on and on.

“My own daughter—a traitor of Rodina!”

Then, shifting from accusation, he wagged an ominous finger: “Nostalghia—it’s the MOST HORRIFYING emotion known to mankind!”

Naum had apparently confessed Mom’s treason to his benefactor, the venerated Baltic commander Admiral Tributs. The World War II great man was reassuring: “When she’s over there, starving and cold, begging us for forgiveness, we will help her to return!”

Dedushka relayed this with glee. “You’ll come crawling back,” he shouted, “on your knees, across our Soviet border! You’ll kiss our beloved black Soviet earth!”

Cousin Masha and I kicked each other under the table: everyone knew that heavily armed men and snarling German shepherds patrolled the Soviet border. No, there was no crossing back.

Marring our intimate family tableau was a houseguest, Inna, a distant relative from Chernovtsy. Sixteen and pimply, Inna had two enormous black braids and a lofty desire to work for the KGB when she graduated from high school. As Dedushka calmed down and tears coursed along Babushka Liza’s doughy cheeks, the KGB wannabe, who despite her ambitions was on the slow side, suddenly gasped in comprehension. She leapt to her feet and proclaimed that she could not share the table with a traitor! Then she barged out the door, braids swinging. On our way down we saw her on the landing, being groped by a non-sober neighbor.

But the true heartache was Baballa.

Mom concealed our departure from her until the very last month, and when Babushka Alla finally heard, she went pale as a ghost.

“All my life I’ve lost those I love,” she told Mom very quietly, lips trembling. “My husband in the war, my grandma in the gulags. When Anyuta was born I got my joy back. She’s the only thing I cherish in life. How can you take her away?”

“To save her life,” Mom replied gravely.

To avoid more heartbreak, Mother pleaded with Baballa not to see us off on our departure morning. Baballa was there all the same. She sat on a bench outside our apartment house, wearing her usual blue pencil skirt, striped blouse, and a hastily applied smear of red lipstick. She was fifty-seven, bleached blonde, six feet tall, and gorgeous. Hugging her, I caught her familiar whiff of Red Poppy face powder and Belomor cigarettes. Shyly she pressed a bottle of vodka and a tin of black caviar into Mom’s hands.

As our taxi drove off I saw her sink onto the bench. That was my last image of her.

At customs we were prodded and questioned, our puny luggage turned inside out. They confiscated Mom’s letters from Lucien, along with a green spray can of Jazmin, a classy imported deodorant.

“That’s your luggage?” said the feral blond passport official, eyeing our two dwarf suitcases. “Veyz mir,” he taunted in a mock Yiddish accent.

I walked backwards for a few steps, waving to Dad, who stood on the other side of the chrome barrier. He was making a “write me” sign with his hands. On the stairs leading up to the departure gate I caught another glimpse of him through the glass. He seemed small and hunched, suddenly, desperately gesticulating to Mom. I tugged at her sleeve but she just kept marching up—a five-foot, hundred-pound elf looking like a miniature sergeant in her hand-sewn khaki skirt suit. I thought of Orpheus, how he glanced back and screwed everything up, and I stopped looking at Dad.

On the plane I was on my ninth plastic tumbler of free Pepsi when they made the announcement. “We have just left Soviet territory.” I wanted to sit there with Mom and ponder the moment, but my bladder was bursting.

Six months later. The elfin woman trudges along the edge of a highway, ahead of her girl, who’s just turned eleven and is now the taller of the pair. Fordi, Pon-ti-aki, Chev-ro-leti. Woman and girl have been learning the names of the different cars that go roaring past, only catastrophic inches away. Apparently there are no sidewalks in Northeast Philadelphia. At least not on the road that leads from the Pathmark as vast as Red Square to their drab one-bedroom on Bustleton Avenue, its ceiling even lower than a khrushcheba’s, its wall-to-wall carpet the murky, speckled gray of crushed hope.

It’s an obscure, foggy night—humid although it’s almost December. The woman has on a flimsy hand-me-down parka, courtesy of her school friend Irina, who helped sponsor her American visa. The girl wears a little-old-lady-style belted coat with sleeves way too short and a bedraggled synthetic fur trim. Both woman and girl are panting, hugging the guardrail as they laboriously trudge. Their arms clutch a paper grocery bag each. Occasionally they put the heavy bags down, slump on the guardrail, and shake their tired arms. Lights glare poisonously through the fog. It starts drizzling. Then raining. The girl struggles with her coat to shield her grocery bag, but it breaks anyway. Squishy loaves of white bread and trays of thirty-nine-cent chicken parts tumble onto the road’s edge. Cars slow down, honk—offering rides? The girl—me—is silently crying. For so many reasons, really. But my mother—the woman—stays cheerful, unperturbed, scrambling to snatch a box of blueberry Pop-Tarts from the oncoming traffic and stuff it into her bag, which is still holding up, miraculously. Clasping the grocery bag with one arm for a moment, she shoots an awkward wave back at the honking cars, shaking her head “no” to a ride. They can’t see her smile in the dark.

“Come, isn’t this an adventure, Anyutik?” she exclaims, trying to cheer me up. “Aren’t Americans nice?”

At this particular sodden moment, of the multitude of things I so sorely miss about Moscow, I miss our avoska bag more than anything else.

And the precious trusted mayonnaise jar—the one we bore to Vienna, then Rome, then Philadelphia? I’ve been missing it, too. Because that Mature Socialist totem has vanished from our lives forever, after Mom, almost straight off the plane, rushed me to see a world-renowned scleroderma expert.

The fancy American hospital where he worked turned out to be barren of diversions and character: no instructive syphilis posters, no patients carrying matchboxes with stool samples and Provansal vessels with urine—along with chocolates and Polish pantyhose—to the bribe-expecting receptionist. No nurses screaming “Trakhatsa nado menshe!” (You should screw less!) at gonorrhea sufferers.

The scleroderma expert was himself an immigrant from far-away Argentina. When Mom detailed our desperate Soviet medical odyssey to him, he shocked her. By laughing. He even summoned his colleagues. The nurse, the new resident, the head of Dermatology—everyone shook with laughter, asking my bewildered mom to repeat again and again how Soviet doctors treated my scleroderma with penicillin and moomiyo goo and healing mud from gaudy Odessa.

Baring his big horsey teeth, the guffawing doc explained at last that childhood scleroderma was an entirely harmless version of this normally fatal disease. It required no treatment at all.

“Welcome to the free world!” the doctor congratulated my now-laughing mother and me as he escorted us to the foyer. When we stepped back out onto the humid Philadelphia sidewalk, Mom was still laughing. Then she hugged me and sobbed and sobbed. The mayonnaise jar, our indispensable socialist artifact, went into an outsize American trash can. Ahead of us was an era of blithely disposable objects.

And Pathmark.

My First Supermarket Experience was the anchoring narrative of the great Soviet epic of immigration to America. Some escapees from our socialist defitsit society actually swooned to the floor (usually in the aisle with toilet paper). Certain men knelt and wept at the sight of forty-two varieties of salami, while their wives—smelling the strawberries and discovering they lacked any fragrance—cried for opposite reasons. Other emigrants, possessed by the ur-Soviet hoarding instinct, frantically loaded up their shopping carts. Still others ran out empty-handed, choked and paralyzed by the multiplicity of choices.

The Jewish Family Services office where we collected our meager refugee stipend resounded with food stories. The stories constituted an archive of socialists’ misadventures with imperialist abundance. Monya and Raya complained about the flavor of American butter—after smearing floor wax on bread. The Goldbergs loved the delicious lunch meat cans with cute pictures of kitties, not suspecting the kitties were the intended consumers. Vovchik, the Odessa lothario, slept with his first American shiksa and stormed out indignant when she offered him Triscuits. Desiccated cardboard squares! Why not a steaming bowl of borscht?

Mom, who was smarter than Orpheus and never once looked back after heading up the ramp at Sheremetyevo Airport, roamed Pathmark’s acres with childlike glee. “She-ree-ohs… Ri-seh-rohonee… Vel. Vee. Tah…” She murmured these alien names as if they’d been concocted by Proust, lovingly prodding and handling all the foodstuffs in their bright packaging, their promiscuous, throwaway tara.

Meanwhile, I steered the supermarket cart behind her like a zombie. I hated the Pathmark of Northeast Philadelphia. It was the graveyard of my own zagranitsa dream, possessed of a fittingly funerary chill and an otherworldly fluorescence. Shuffling the aisles, I felt entombed in the abundance of food, now drained of its social power and magic. Who really wanted the eleven-cent bag of bananas if you couldn’t parade it down Kalinin Prospect inside your transparent avoska after standing in a four-hour line, basking in envious stares? What happened when you replaced the heroic Soviet verb dostat’ (to obtain with difficulty) with the banal kupit’ (to buy), a term barely used back in the USSR? Shopping at Pathmark was acquisitioning robbed of thrills, drama, ritual. Where did blat come into play, with its savvy maneuvering of social ties, its camaraderie? Where was envy and social prestige? The reassuring communal ochered’ smell of hangovers and armpits? Nobody and nothing smelled inside Pathmark.

A few weeks into our Philadelphia life, I began to suspect that all those cheery disposable boxes and plastic containers piled on Pathmark’s shelves were a decoy to conceal the dark truth. That American food—I hesitate to say it—wasn’t exactly delicious. Not the Pop-Tarts that Mom served cold and semi-raw because nobody told her about the toasting part. Not American sosiski, hot dogs sour from nitrates. Definitely not the yellow-skinned thirty-nine-cent chicken parts bandaged in plastic. These made me pine for the bluish, Pravda-swaddled chicks Baballa brought back from her elite canteen at Gosstroy. Those had graphic claws, a poignant comb, sad dead eyes, and stray feathers Grandma burned off with her clunky cigarette lighter, filling the house with a smell like burnt hair. We enjoyed the chicks once a month, as a defitsit treat.

When our Jewish Family Services stipend ended, Mom worked cleaning Philadelphia houses, a job she pronounced “fascinating!” Then she landed work as a receptionist at a hospital, which required her to ride three separate buses. Her shift began at noon and brought her home past ten, when I was already in bed. Tactfully she spared me the details of standing in all weather at unshielded bus stops. I, in turn, never told her how I felt coming back to an empty, ugly apartment from the dreaded Louis H. Farrell Elementary School, with only our hand-me-down grainy black-and-white TV for company. When Dinah Shore came on, I wanted to howl. She was the human equivalent of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that came with my free refugee school lunch. All squishy, pseudofolksy whiteness, with an unnatural, cloying coupling of sugar and salt.

I spent most of my first afterschool hours slumped on our shared mattress, nose in books from the two boxes of them Mom had had slow-mailed from Moscow. The bottle-green Chekhov, the gray Dostoyevsky—breaking off from their color-coordinated collected works, I tried to practice Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons on the battered secondhand piano Mom had bought for me with a handout from Clara, her American aunt. But the notes under my fingers produced only tears, the wrenching reminder of our old Arbat life. And so I paced in dazed agitation, from the bedroom, past the TV to the piano, to the kitchenette and back. And yet not even in my worst homesick moments could I admit to missing Rodina with any sincerity. Sincerity, it seemed, had been bled out of us by the cynical Brezhnevian seventies. Which added a layer of denial to homesickness.

Rodina-Urodina. A Motherland that rhymed with “ugly hag.” A scarlet-blazed myth that flipped into an ironic gag. Historically the word—denoting one’s birthplace, from the root rod (origin/kin)—had been the intimate, maternal counterpart to otchizna (fatherland), that resoundingly heroic, martially tinted noun. The Bolsheviks banned Rodina, suspicious of its folkloric entwining with nationalism. Under Stalin it resurfaced in 1934, aligned now with official Soviet patriotism. In World War II it was mobilized full force—feminized further—as Rodina-Mat’, literally “motherland-mother,” to be defended to the last by its sons and daughters. Grassroots patriotism swept the nation. But by my childhood, like all “meaningful” words, Rodina had acquired a cartoonish bathos. Even if treason to the motherland was a criminal offense.

Come to think of it, there wasn’t a single word for the country we’d never see again that I could use with any authentic nostalgia. Soviet Union? Pining for anything with Soviet in it was politically incorrect since the word evoked the lumbering carcass of the official regime. Rossiya (Russia)? That too was tainted with the saccharine kitsch of state-certified nationalism: all those swaying birch trees and troika sleds. And so I resorted to sovok or sovdep—bitterly sarcastic slang for the land of the Homo sovieticus.

Such linguistic calibrations didn’t concern Mother much. After all, she’d spent most of her adult Soviet life as a spiritual émigré, yearning for the imaginary Elsewhere she envisioned as her own true Rodina. Occasionally she’d admit to missing the tart-green antonovka apples, a fairly neutral Nabokovian gesture. And once, only once, when she heard a song about Arbat, our intimate old Moscow neighborhood, she burst into tears.

Myself, I had neither accepted nor rejected our socialist state. Instead I constantly played the angles, with its values and countervalues, its resonances. From this all-encompassing game I’d created my childhood identity. So now, along with the unmentionable Rodina I was mourning the loss of a self.

My name, for example.

Anna, Anya, An’ka, Anechka, Anyuta, Nyura, Niusha. What a menu of nuanced social meanings and linguistic attitudes available within my own single name. And now? I wasn’t even Anna (my official passport name). I was a Philly-accented Ee-ya-nna—the sonorous, open Russian “A” squished and rubberized like the Wonder Bread of our exile.

Bread. I missed Moscow bread.

Standing at the fridge, dragging a slice of Oscar Mayer bologna onto a slice of spongy whiteness, I’d mentally inhale the voluptuous sourdough tang of our neighborhood bakery by the tree-lined Tverskoy Boulevard. There, manipulating in my small grip a giant two-pronged fork attached by a grimy string to the wall, I’d poke and press, testing for freshness, the dark burnished loaves arranged on their tilted worn-wood shelves under a slogan: BREAD IS OUR SOVIET WEALTH—DON’T BUY MORE THAN YOU NEED!

We had arrived in Philadelphia on November 14, 1974. A few weeks later, we noticed people appearing downtown in drab uniforms, singing and clanging bells beside red buckets under puzzling signs for a “Salvation Army.” To this day, “Jingle Bells” and “Joy to the World” pierce me as the soundtracks of émigré dislocation.

I had stopped believing in Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) when I was six and we still lived in Davydkovo. My neighbor Kiril and I stayed up past midnight waiting for the promised arrival of our Soviet New Year’s version of Santa in his long flowing robe. I had on a tiara of snowflakes and a satiny costume gown Mom fashioned for the occasion from an old dress of hers. The doorbell rang at last. Ded Moroz himself swayed on our threshold, majestic and glassy-eyed. Then all six feet of him collapsed face-first into our khrushcheba’s tiny foyer. The next morning he was still there, snoring, still in his robe but with his beard now detached and crumpled under one cheek. A dead-drunk Ded Moroz wasn’t the worst. The really awful ones screwed up the gifts parents had given them in advance—delivering rubber-smelling inflatable beach balls, for instance, to the family who’d bought expensive East German toy sets.

But I loved Soviet novy god (New Year’s) anyway. The harsh scent of pine on our balcony where our tree awaited decoration. My small mom teetering on a tall wobbly stool to reach the high closet for the box of our New Year’s ornaments, swaddled in coarse pharmacy cotton. By the last week of December, the State dumped long-hoarded delicacies onto store counters. From Praga Dad carried home the white box of its famous chocolate layer cake; Mom’s avoska bulged with sharply fragrant thin-skinned clementines from Abkhazia. And eagerly we awaited Baballa’s holiday zakaz, the elite take-home package of defitsit goods from Gosstroy. You never knew what each year would bring. I prayed for the buttery balik (smoked sturgeon) instead of the prestigious but disgusting canned cod liver.

Philadelphia had no snow our first December. Worse, fellow émigrés gravely warned one another against putting up Christmas trees, since Jewish-American sponsors liked to drop in on their charges to deliver mezuzahs or bags of used clothes. Our generous sponsors went ballistic at the sight of an evergreen, sometimes even reporting the blasphemous refugees to Jewish Family Services. Many ex-Soviet citizens didn’t realize that their Jewishness was now a religion, not simply the “ethnicity” declared in the fifth entry of their surrendered red passports. The sponsors in turn had no clue that Christmas was banned in the USSR—that the trees, gifts, Ded Moroz, and general cheer were the secular socialist hooray to the new year.

Obediently Mom lit the alien Hanukkah candles on the menorah we’d been given. On the plywood shelf around it she heaped candies gooey with vile peanut butter, and charcoal-black cookies filled with something white and synthetic. A charcoal-black cookie! Would anyone eat such a thing? The candies remained unsucked, the cookies unwrapped. My eyes grew duller and more vacant each day—and Mom relented and bought a yolka, a holiday tree, from the five-and-dime store. Barely twelve inches tall, made of rough plastic, and decorated with out-of-scale red and green balls that cost nineteen cents a package, it didn’t make me any happier.

For our first New Year’s in America, instead of champagne Mom served the sticky-sweet Manischewitz wine our sponsors had urged on us. And she gave our celebratory salat Olivier a thorough Pathmark makeover! Mercifully, Mom didn’t tamper with the potatoes and eggs. But she replaced the proper fresh-boiled diced carrots with canned ones, swapped our canned peas for the bright-green frozen variety, devoid of the requisite mushiness. For protein, some evil force propelled her toward the gristly, vinegary Hormel’s pickled pig’s feet. Worst of all was the mayo. Instead of our loose, tangy-sharp vanished Provansal, it was Hellmann’s now smothering Mom’s Olivier in a cloyingly fluffy, infuriatingly sweet blanket.

At eleven p.m. Mom scooped the Pathmark Olivier into the two Czech bowls with pink flowers—the scant remnants of our past lives we’d carried inside our two tiny suitcases.

The bowls had been Baballa’s present to us for our last Moscow New Year’s. That night, right before suppertime, she’d stormed into our Arbat apartment, furiously stomping snow off her green wool coat, swearing in a voice raspy from cigarettes and cold. “Your present,” she snorted bitterly, handing Mom a misshapen, rattling parcel inside an avoska. It had been a very desirable Czech dinner set. Except that after standing in line for it for most of the day, Baballa had slipped on some ice on her way over. We sat on the floor under our festive Soviet tree, picking through a wreck of broken socialist china. Only two bowls had survived intact. At the dinner table Baballa drowned her regrets in vodka, topping up my glass with champagne when Mom wasn’t looking. After dessert and the turning-of-the-year tumult, she led us all out for a walk to Red Square.

It had just stopped snowing outside and the temperatures were plunging to minus twenty. And I was drunk. For the first time in my life. On Red Square! Thanks to the cold, the alcohol coursed through my bloodstream slowly, caressingly, warming my limbs as we tramped along. Beneath the floodlit tropical marzipan domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, we uncorked another bottle of Sovetskoye bubbly. It was 1974, the year of our emigration. My parents kissed on the lips while Grandma sang patriotic songs in disharmony with the other drunks on the square. Squealing with pleasure like a collective farm piglet, I rolled around in the fresh powdery snowdrifts, sending up silvery showers twinkling and dancing against the floodlights.

In Philly, as the clock struck 1975, Mom and I picked at our Pathmark salat Olivier and sipped the bubbleless Manischewitz from hand-me-down mugs. Far away, eight hours earlier, in another land, Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev had once again adjusted his reading glasses, rattled his medals, thunderously cleared his throat, and then shuffled his papers in a desperate scramble to locate the first line of his New Year’s address to the Rodina.

“Dear Compatriots!” The phrase no longer included us.