My blog– July 2016
My eyes light up and make a special effort to smile and nod as the author of The Education of a Traitor, Svetlana Grobman, describes her childhood in Cold War Russia. Though I can’t speak Russian and I never set foot in Moscow, I have lived in a post-Soviet city, which gave me the geography of their everyday lives. From Romania to Siberia, from Belarus to Kazakhstan, anyone who has lived in the Soviet apartments knows how to cook a meal in a minuscule kitchen with interrupted water and electricity. We know the dingy, unkempt stairwells that connect the massive apartment buildings and the stern-faced clerks who man the kiosks.
So, without leaving my city of Columbia, Missouri today, Svetlana’s book talk sends me to Russia like I’m a virtual time-traveler. As she reads two of her short stories aloud, every word is precious. Every word transports me to my years living among Russians in Mongolia in the 1990s, as if it happened yesterday.
I miss the blue and white porcelain bowl that held the borscht, the pots and pans with their flowers painted on the shiny surface, the mushroom hunting in the forest, and the narrow stove that took forever to heat a kettle of water.
But it is mainly the food that I recall: the array of tasty beet and carrot salads, the jams and drinks made from exotic berries, yeasty buns stuffed with ground beef and rice, the million-layered cake with its creamy frosting, and the little meat dumplings with sour cream made by women in their white kerchiefs who work in large rooms of metal bowls and ferocious machines for the production of all manner of creamed and curdled cheeses.
By the time of Q & A, another woman’s eyes light up when she hears I lived overseas during the transition from socialism and occupation to democracy and capitalism. Upon investigation, I learn that she is from Belarus and had hoped that’s where I had lived too. But no matter, our hearts are kin as the Soviet Union’s influence was broad and deep, and everyone swept into it will never be the same. We share common roots and lick the borscht bowl clean for every drop.
