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Russian Tattoo: A Memoir, by Elena Gorokhova
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Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing
From the bestselling author of A Mountain of Crumbs, a “brilliant and illuminating” (BookPage) portrait of mothers and daughters that reaches from Cold War Russia to modern-day New Jersey to show how the ties that hold you back can also teach you how to start over.
Elena Gorokhova moves to the US in her twenties to join her American husband and to break away from her mother, a mirror image of her Soviet Motherland: overbearing, protective, and difficult to leave. Before the birth of Elena’s daughter, her mother comes to help care for the baby and stays for twenty-four years, ordering everyone to eat soup and wear a hat, just as she did in Leningrad. Russian Tattoo is the story of a unique balancing act and a family struggle: three generations of strong women with very different cultural values, all living under the same roof and battling for control. As Elena strives to bridge the gap between the cultures of her past and present and find her place in a new world, she comes to love the fierce resilience of her Soviet mother when she recognizes it in her American daughter.
“Gorokhova writes about her life with a novelist’s gift,” says The New York Times, and her second memoir is filled with empathy, insight, and humor.
- Sales Rank: #901270 in Books
- Published on: 2015-01-06
- Released on: 2015-01-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.10" w x 6.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
Review
"This incredibly powerful book slips into your unconscious with charm and warmth and then grabs you by the gut. By the time you reach the end, you’ll have experienced the laughter, sorrow, joy, regret, love and hurt of a real life. And you’ll have a lump in your throat the size of Petersburg. With a magical command of language, Elena Gorokhova has painted images on my brain I won’t forget, as if I’d lived those moments myself. Because, somehow, I did." (Alan Alda)
"Elena Gorokhova's memoir of her journey to America is delightful, hilarious and bracingly candid, a memorable odyssey of learning and striving as she escapes from the crumbling old world to a strange and mystifying new life." (David E. Hoffman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Dead Hand)
“Fluid and evocative prose. … An imaginative writer.” (The Washington Post)
“[An] evocative memoirist building on a fine previous volume … [Gorokhova] imbues this narrative of the gathering momentum of her assimilation with admirable esprit.” (Elle)
"Russian Tattoo is the story of an immigrant, of leaving what you know and love. It is the story of mothers and daughters--a story of love, forgiveness, and the desire to belong." (Anya Von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking)
“Self-effacing and candid, yet also deeply observant and as powerfully descriptive as a novel, Russian Tattoo is that rare book written by an immigrant that helps a native understand their country better, seeing it from the peeled-back perspective of a newcomer.” (Russian Life)
“Written fully, laden with emotion.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune)
“If Elena Gorokhova’s splendid second memoir merely conveyed to readers a vivid, almost visceral understanding of the sometimes paralyzing sense of dislocation she experienced arriving in the United States in 1980 from the Soviet Union, that alone would be reason enough to read it. … Brilliant [and] illuminating.” (BookPage)
“Engaging. … With wry, unswervingly honest observer’s eye, Gorokhova chronicles the increasing strangeness of her new country. … This work from a young immigrant’s point of view is both wondrous and stinging.” (Publishers Weekly)
"Russian Tattoo is a page-turner from the start. . . . Gorokhova fills her story of arriving in the U.S. with telling, fascinating details . . . [and] bravely, frankly shares her life." (Eloise Kinney Booklist)
“Russian Tattoo is a gripping story, Elena Gorokhova is a clear-voiced and human narrator, and her life is captivating without becoming incomprehensible. The glory of the book is in its little things: the pride that comes from feeling respected by a parent, and the trust needed to humble yourself before them.” (The Book Reporter)
“A refreshing amount of candor elevates this memoir of an immigrant’s life in America. … [A] wonderful and entertaining work.” (Washington Independent Review of Books)
“An epic read.” (Brit & Co (blog))
“Blazingly entertaining.” (Caroline Leavitt (blogger))
About the Author
Elena Gorokhova grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, although for most of her life it was known to her as Leningrad. At the age of twenty-four she married an American and came to the United States with only a twenty kilogram suitcase to start a new life. The bestselling author of A Mountain of Crumbs and Russian Tattoo, she has a Doctorate in Language Education and currently lives in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph, on BBC Radio, and in a number of literary magazines.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Russian Tattoo
One
I wish I could clear my mind and focus on my imminent American future. I am twelve kilometers up in the air—forty thousand feet, according to the new, nonmetric system I have yet to learn. Every time I glance at the overhead television screen that shows the position of my Aeroflot flight, this future is getting closer. The miniature airplane is like a needle over the Atlantic, stitching the two hemispheres together with the thread of our route. I wish I could get ready and dredge my mind of all the silt of my previous life. But I can’t. I can’t help but think of my mother’s crumpled face back in Leningrad airport, of her gaze, open, like a fresh wound, of her smells of the apple jam from our dacha mixed with the sharp odor of formaldehyde she’d brought home from the medical school where she teaches anatomy. I can’t help but think of my sister Marina’s tight embrace and her hair the color of apricots, one fruit that failed to grow in our dacha garden my grandfather planted. Ten hours earlier, I said good-bye to both of them.
In my Leningrad courtyard, where a taxi was waiting to take us to the airport, a small girl with braids had crouched on the ledge of a sandbox: green eyes, slightly slanted, betraying the drop of Tatar ancestry in every Russian; faint freckles, as if someone had splashed muddy water onto her skin. As the plane taxied past evergreen forests and riveted itself into the low Russian sky, I longed to be that girl, not ready to leave, still comfortable on the ledge of her childhood sandbox.
When I am not watching the plane advance westward on the screen, I talk to my neighbor, a morose-looking American with thin-rimmed glasses and a plastic cup of vodka in his hand. He has just warned me, between sips of Stolichnaya, that I will never find a teaching job in the United States. He is a former professor of Russian literature, bitter and disillusioned, and, as we glide over Greenland, he dismisses my approaching American future with a single wave of his hand. “You should go back home,” he says, staring into his glass and rattling the ice cubes. “It’s 1980, and what you’re looking for in the U.S. no longer exists. You’ll be happier with your family in Russia.”
My family in Russia would applaud this statement—especially my mother, who thinks I’ll be begging on the streets and sleeping under a bridge, as Pravda has informed her.
I know I should tell this Russian expert that my new American husband is waiting for me at the airport, probably with a list of teaching jobs in his pocket. I should tell him to mind his own business. I should tell him that no one in Russia puts ice in drinks or ever sips vodka. But I don’t. I am a docile ex–Young Pioneer who only this morning left the Soviet Union, a ravaged suitcase on the KGB inspector’s table with twenty kilograms of what used to be my life.
In the sterile maze of Washington Dulles International Airport, an official pulls me into a little room, tells me to sit down, and points a camera at my face. A flash goes off and I blink. Another man in uniform dips my index finger in ink and presses it to paper. “Sign and date here.” He points to a line, and I write my name and the date, August 10, 1980. “Here is your green card,” he says and hands me a small rectangular piece of plastic. I don’t know why he calls it a green card. It is white, with a fingerprint in the middle to certify that the bewildered face is mine.
I feel as if I were inside an aquarium, sensing everything through layers of water, clear and still and deeper than I know, with real life happening to other people behind the glass. They are pulling suitcases that roll magically behind them; they are waiting for their flights in docile, passive lines—all without color or sound, like a silent film. With a new identity bestowed on me by the card between my fingers, I float out of the immigration office, the weight of my suitcase strangely diminished, as though the value of my Russian possessions has instantly shrunk with the strike of the immigration stamp. The sign in front of me points an arrow to something called restroom, although I can see it is not going to dispense any rest. The floor gleams here, the hand dryers whir, and the faucets sparkle—restroom is a perfect word for this luxury that seems to have emerged straight from the spotless future of science fiction. I think of the rusty toilets of Pulkovo International Airport I just left, of their corroded pipes and sad, hanging pull chains that never release enough water to wash away the lowly feeling of barely being human.
In the waiting crowd I make out Robert, my new American husband, a man I barely know. He is peering in my direction through his thick glasses, not yet able to see me among the exiting passengers. It feels odd to apply the word husband to a tall stranger in corduroy jeans and tight springs of black hair around his waiting face. And what about me? Do I want to be a wife, the word that in Russia mostly conjures standing: on lines, at bus stops, by the stove?
Five months earlier, Robert came to Leningrad to marry me, to my mother’s horror. We stood in the wedding hall of the Acts of Marriage Palace on the Neva embankment—a small flock of my mortified relatives and close friends—in front of a woman in a red dress with a wide red ribbon across her chest, who recited a speech about the creation of a new society cell. The speech was modified for international marriages: there was no reference to our future contributions to the Soviet cause or to the bright dawn of communism.
To be honest, the possibility of leaving Russia was never as thrilling as the prospect of leaving my mother. My mother, a mirror image of my Motherland—overbearing and protective, controlling and nurturing—had spun a tangle of conflicted feelings as interlaced as the nerves and muscles in her anatomy charts I’d copied since I was eight. Our apartment on Maklina Prospekt was the seat of the politburo; my mother, its permanent chairman. She presided in our kitchen over a pot of borsch, ordering me to eat in the same voice that made her anatomy students quiver. She sheltered me from dangers, experience, and life itself by an embrace so tight that it left me innocent and gasping for air and that sent me fumbling through the first ordeals of adulthood. She had survived the famine, Stalin’s terror, and the Great Patriotic War, and she controlled and protected, ferociously. What had happened to her was not going to happen to Marina and me.
Robert and I met last summer, during the six-week Russian program for American students at Leningrad University, where I was teaching. For the last two weeks of classes—the time we spent walking around the city—I showed him my real hometown, those places too ordinary to be included among the glossy snapshots of bronze statues and golden domes. We walked along the cracked asphalt side streets where crumbling arches lead into mazes of courtyards, those wells out of Dostoyevsky that depress the spirit and twist the soul into a truly miserable Russian knot. If the director of the program, or her KGB husband, had known I was spending time with an American, I wouldn’t now be gawking at the splendor of the airport in Washington, DC. After four months of letters, Robert came back to Leningrad in December to offer to marry me if I wanted to leave the country—on one condition: I had to understand that he wasn’t ready to get married.
He wasn’t ready to settle down with one person, Robert said. He wanted to continue seeing other women, particularly his colleague Karen, who taught Russian in Austin, where he was working on his PhD in physics. We would have an open marriage, he said. “An open marriage?” I repeated as we were walking toward my apartment building in Leningrad. It was minus twenty-five degrees Celsius and the air was so cold it felt like shards of glass scraping inside my throat as we clutched onto each other because the sidewalk was solid ice.
I didn’t know marriage could be paired with an adjective gutting the essence of the word’s meaning, but then I didn’t know lots of things. I didn’t know, for example, that my mother, who has always been in love with propriety and order, had two marriages before she met my father—two short-lived, hasty unions, of which neither one seemed perfect or even good. I didn’t know, before my university friends told me, that it was legal to marry a foreigner and leave the country. My mother had diligently sheltered me from the realities of Russian life; my Motherland had kept all other ways of life away from everyone within its borders. We were crowded on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, clad in ill-fitting garb and ignorant about the rest of the world.
“I understand,” I said to Robert on that frosty day in Leningrad—words that hung in the air in a small cloud of frozen breath—although I really didn’t.
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A melancholy read from a conflicted author
By N. B. Kennedy
Elena Gorokhova married an American tourist in order to leave behind her constricting Soviet life. She'd had enough of the empty Soviet promise of a bright future, of the crumbling buildings, food shortages, endless lines, and stolid bureaucracy. In fact, she'd had enough of her family: her overbearing mother, her dramatic drunk of a sister, her provincial extended family. Trouble is, her husband isn't the person he appeared to be in the few short weeks of their acquaintance. After a brief and miserable marriage in Austin, TX, she is exiled to her mother-in-law's house in Princeton, NJ.
Although her husband is unfeeling and cold, and leaves her to navigate her new life on her own (to me he sounded like a person with Asperger's), the bigger stumbling block is Elena herself. She is overwhelmed by everything -- hamburgers, grocery stores, bus stops -- so she retreats and sits at home watching horror movies. Although she speaks English well after years of study, she doesn't attempt to engage with other Americans, even after she takes a few waitressing jobs. In fact, she seems to dread every human encounter. "You never sound happy," her husband says. "All you do is complain that you hate everything around here."
Her husband was right. That was my biggest problem with this book. Although I enjoyed the writing, and the honest and raw immigrant story, the tone of the book is one of resignation, doubt and despair. Even when she marries a colleague of her ex-husband's mother and is happy in love, the litany of complaints continues. Everything makes her feel like a failure, and she continually spins down the rabbit hole of guilt. The couple vacations in London, and all she can say is that she is "undeserving of all its royal grandeur" and characterizes her time as "a week of guilty sightseeing." Her propensity toward melancholy only worsens when her mother and sister come to live with her and she and her husband have a daughter. The only spark of life in the book are scenes of her teaching English as a second language at a community college.
The ending of the book took me by surprise. In a visit to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) with her grown daughter, she waxes eloquently about this city that she is suddenly desperately homesick for: canals, lilacs, stately buildings, northern light, smoked salmon and Argentinian wine. What happened to all her complaints about her Russian life? She makes a good point about feeling like she doesn't fit in in either country, squeezed between her Russian mother and American daughter, but the nostalgia comes out of nowhere. What about the cramped apartments, the continual food shortages, endless lines, ill-fitting and cheaply made clothing, filthy hospitals and substandard medical care, surly shopkeepers and harassing bureaucrats? Is that really what she's longing for? She's experiencing the city with all the privileges of an American tourist. I lost patience with the author at this point, and it colored my whole opinion of the book.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Pages of a Life
By ck
Life, love, happiness, culture, obligations, and choices.
At first glance, "Russian Tattoo" is the memoir of a life in two distinct chapters; the first in Leningrad and the second in New Jersey. Elena Gorokhova could have focused solely on the countless differences between these two components of her life and penned a riveting book.
However, she's gone deeper, and shown that a masterful memoir isn't only the province of the aged, but of those who are able to recognize the momentous and the everyday as equally revealing, if one is equal to the process and willing to share unstintingly of the result.
Gorokhova shows us the moments of uncertainty that are part of adjusting to life in a new country, where idiom can trip you up, and the unexpected can be amazing or utterly baffling. She shares her first encounter with a hamburger, her introduction to a supermarket, and her trek to a job interview with self-effacing humor tinged with a wistfulness for her 24-year-old self.
These moments, and her tales of building a career and family life in her new country -- told in counterpoint to memories of her childhood in Leningrad -- are enjoyable. They're also thought-provoking, especially if you've ever wondered what it would be like to move someplace fundamentally different than your hometown.
But where Gorokhova excels is in delineating the notion of family -- the family of her childhood, the family of her heart that she built in the U.S., and how each enriched the other. The book blurb will tell you more than I'm willing to say about the "what" of this cross-pollination. Please know that what's even more powerful are the various "how"s that occur. I loved this book, and thank the author for her generosity in sharing these pages from her life.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
On becoming an American
By KnC Books
With rare exceptions, we are a nation of immigrants. It seems to be part of the American consciousness that we conveniently forget that fact within a generation or two. We forget how our grandparents or great-grandparents struggled to learn a new language, a language full of secret idioms and unspoken meanings. We forget how they worked to fit in with a new and different culture that is itself a mixture of many cultures. We forget how they labored at menial and poorly paying jobs, no matter what their education might have been, because the language and cultural differences threw up walls against them.
Elena Gorokhova's "Russian Tattoo" serves to remind us of those things that we have chosen to forget on the road to becoming Americans. The twin barriers of language and culture mark the immigrant as clearly and visibly as a tattoo, a label of difference and strangeness that closes the doors of opportunity. Coming to America has given all of us a chance to start our lives over, and that is exactly what is required. Whoever and whatever you were before you arrived: a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist - is largely wiped away and you will find yourself washing dishes or waiting tables, trying to learn English from people who talk louder at you to make you understand.
"Russian Tattoo" is the story of this American rite of passage as seen from the inside. Elena Gorokhova's journey is the journey that our own immigrant realtives took, as much as we want to deny it. OUR forebears learned English immediately, and were tax-paying contributing members of society within a month of getting off the boat - or so our romantic notions would have it. The fact is, my immigrant great-grandfather worked in an auto factory, was a truck driver, and English was a second language to his native German. HIS son was a United States Marine who served in the Ardennes in World War One. Sometimes it takes a generation or two or two to achieve American-hood.
With each new wave of immigrants, those of us who are already here inevitably push back against the would-be new arrivals. "Russian Tattoo" lets us see that from the viewpoint of someone who was on the receiving end; not as a search for sympathy but simply understanding. The road to becoming an American is not an easy one, getting here is only half the battle. We all have our own tattoos, maybe it's time to acknowledge them.
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