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A review by cameliarose
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen
5.0
Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking is a memoir and a family’s reflection on the 80 years of Soviet Union history. Anya von Bremzen was born in Moscow, USSR in 1963. She emigrated to the United States with her Jewish dissident mother in 1974. In Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, she tells stories of her childhood, her mother Larisa, maternal grandparents Naum and Liza and her father Sergei.
The writing is humorous, even though the stories are dark at times. She writes about scarcity and hunger, the WWII soldiers’ amputated arms and legs frozen in snow, as hard as tree trunks, the siege of Leningrad, Ukraine famine in the 1930s, and Stalin’s cleanse and Gulag. A lot of Soviet jokes. "A Soviet begins her life at the long line of birth registry and ends at the equally long burial line." The ridiculous anti-parasite law. What it really means by socialist equality, and the 27 shades of "comrade".
Quotes:
“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.”
History in this book is intimate, filled with details of food, scarcity of food, and longing for food.
Quotes:
“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.”
"Dreaming of food, I already knew, is just as rewarding as eating it."
In a land of false abundance and real scarcity, small pleasures like little pieces of jam-filled candy leave permanent imprints on one’s memory. At the age of 10, Anya became a self-claimed “black-marketer”--she made friends with kids from foreign embassies, got invited to their fancy homes, secretly saved up the candies, cut each into small pieces and sold them to her classmates in the school bathroom.
Patriotism is fiction. What "motherland" means to the three generations of Soviets is presented well in the book. Her grandparents were the idealists, her mother the dissident, and herself who knew everything was farce. Yet, years later she can still recall her childhood fantasies induced by propaganda, because the “raw emotional grip of a totalitarian personality cult” is hard to escape.
Personal identity is another theme in the book. As a daughter of a Jewish mother and a Russian father, by moving to the US, she escaped the choice of which “ethnic”--Jewish or Russian--to “officially'' identify herself, the former would cast her as a lesser member of the society and restrict her social standing. The unmade choice haunted her. After having arrived in the United States, she soon discovered Jewish was not only an “ethnic”, but also a religion she knew nothing about. Back in the USSR, her rebellious mother secretly celebrated Christmas because Christmas was banned. Ironically, putting up a Christmas tree in their Philadelphia apartment offended their zealous Jewish American sponsors, because it was un-Jewish. At a banquet hosted by a Russian Royal from the Romanov era whose name “too grand to pronounce”, she discovered their Russia and her USSR had nothing in common.
The last chapter is the author's visit to Moscow in the early 2010s. In the Putin Land, the official history of Russia, as the author puts it, is a "tightly scripted remembering". In Moscow, the author attended a reading of Anna Akhmatova by one of the great poet's "ancient" friends. Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, a poem lamenting those brutally purged, was read right under the picture of Stalin. The author burst out, "Ladies, have you lost your mind?!" To her, the scene was an “insane asylum where history has been dismantled and photoshopped into a pastiche of victims, murderers, dictators and dissidents, all rubbing sentimental shoulders together.” But she soon realized she had no rights howling at these frail survivors of a terrible era. Yet, the frail woman did not blame her, instead, she only gave her a mischievous half-smile. Perhaps it is true that "the bystanders see most of the game, while the players get limited vision", or perhaps the players simply just play along.
"All happy food memories are alike; all unhappy food memories are unhappy in its own fashion." Deep down, Anya von Bremzen will always feel the pull from the fantasy land of her childhood, a world existed in propaganda, and yes, in the Kremlin's banquets.
The writing is humorous, even though the stories are dark at times. She writes about scarcity and hunger, the WWII soldiers’ amputated arms and legs frozen in snow, as hard as tree trunks, the siege of Leningrad, Ukraine famine in the 1930s, and Stalin’s cleanse and Gulag. A lot of Soviet jokes. "A Soviet begins her life at the long line of birth registry and ends at the equally long burial line." The ridiculous anti-parasite law. What it really means by socialist equality, and the 27 shades of "comrade".
Quotes:
“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.”
History in this book is intimate, filled with details of food, scarcity of food, and longing for food.
Quotes:
“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.”
"Dreaming of food, I already knew, is just as rewarding as eating it."
In a land of false abundance and real scarcity, small pleasures like little pieces of jam-filled candy leave permanent imprints on one’s memory. At the age of 10, Anya became a self-claimed “black-marketer”--she made friends with kids from foreign embassies, got invited to their fancy homes, secretly saved up the candies, cut each into small pieces and sold them to her classmates in the school bathroom.
Patriotism is fiction. What "motherland" means to the three generations of Soviets is presented well in the book. Her grandparents were the idealists, her mother the dissident, and herself who knew everything was farce. Yet, years later she can still recall her childhood fantasies induced by propaganda, because the “raw emotional grip of a totalitarian personality cult” is hard to escape.
Personal identity is another theme in the book. As a daughter of a Jewish mother and a Russian father, by moving to the US, she escaped the choice of which “ethnic”--Jewish or Russian--to “officially'' identify herself, the former would cast her as a lesser member of the society and restrict her social standing. The unmade choice haunted her. After having arrived in the United States, she soon discovered Jewish was not only an “ethnic”, but also a religion she knew nothing about. Back in the USSR, her rebellious mother secretly celebrated Christmas because Christmas was banned. Ironically, putting up a Christmas tree in their Philadelphia apartment offended their zealous Jewish American sponsors, because it was un-Jewish. At a banquet hosted by a Russian Royal from the Romanov era whose name “too grand to pronounce”, she discovered their Russia and her USSR had nothing in common.
The last chapter is the author's visit to Moscow in the early 2010s. In the Putin Land, the official history of Russia, as the author puts it, is a "tightly scripted remembering". In Moscow, the author attended a reading of Anna Akhmatova by one of the great poet's "ancient" friends. Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, a poem lamenting those brutally purged, was read right under the picture of Stalin. The author burst out, "Ladies, have you lost your mind?!" To her, the scene was an “insane asylum where history has been dismantled and photoshopped into a pastiche of victims, murderers, dictators and dissidents, all rubbing sentimental shoulders together.” But she soon realized she had no rights howling at these frail survivors of a terrible era. Yet, the frail woman did not blame her, instead, she only gave her a mischievous half-smile. Perhaps it is true that "the bystanders see most of the game, while the players get limited vision", or perhaps the players simply just play along.
"All happy food memories are alike; all unhappy food memories are unhappy in its own fashion." Deep down, Anya von Bremzen will always feel the pull from the fantasy land of her childhood, a world existed in propaganda, and yes, in the Kremlin's banquets.