I grew up believing that life in the Soviet Union must have been terrible, and this book mostly confirms that it was. What Anya von Bremzen has written here is an insider's look at daily life in the Soviet Union as expressed in food. Think "Julie and Julia" with Stalin and Brezhnev in place of Julia Child. This is not a cookbook, though it does have a couple recipes.
This is that rare book that stirs our souls and our senses. And all of it is bound together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia, and piercing observations. Her family's stories are embedded in a larger historical epic: of Lenin's bloody grain requisitioning, World War II hunger and survival, Stalin's table manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's anti-alcohol policies, and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. Through the meals she and her mother re-create, Anya tells the story of three generations-her grandparents', her mother's, and her own. To make sense of that past, she and her mother decided to eat and cook their way through seven decades of the Soviet experience. These days Anya lives in two parallel food universes: one in which she writes about four-star restaurants, the other in which a simple banana-a once a year treat back in the USSR-still holds an almost talismanic sway over her psyche. When she was ten, the two of them fled the political repression of Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and no right of return. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy-and, finally, intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother.
There, born in 1963 in a Kafkaesque communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, Anya grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at her school, and, like most Soviet citizens, longing for a taste of the mythical West.
Like kotleti (Soviet burgers) or the festive Salat Olivier, it summons up the complex, bittersweet flavors of life in that vanished Atlantis called the USSR. Lovers of vobla risk breaking a tooth or puncturing a gum on the once-popular snack, but for Anya it's transporting. Anya von Bremzen has vobla-rock-hard, salt-cured dried Caspian roach fish. Proust had his madeleine Narnia's Edmund had his Turkish delight. A celebrated food writer captures the flavors of the Soviet experience in a sweeping, tragicomic, multi-generational memoir that brilliantly illuminates the history and culture of a vanished empire.
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