A review by wahistorian
Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea by Teffi

5.0

Teffi’s ‘Memories’ captures the universal experiences of refugees: the uncertainty, the rumors, the panic, but also resilience, as people flee to safety while holding on to hope that they will return to the lives they have always known. In 1917 poet and playwright Teffi fled the political chaos after the Russian Revolution political chaos; she enjoyed some renown in Moscow, which helped her as she “slid down the map” from Moscow to the Crimean port city of Novorossisk, and finally on to Constantinople (and, ultimately, Paris). Along the way she shares the stories of other refugees—humorous and sad—none of whom knew where to settle and when. “My memories…are still being whirled about by a stifling whirlwind—just as scraps of this and splinters of that…just as people themselves were whirled this way and that way, left and right, over the mountains or into the sea,” she writes. “Soulless and mindless, with the cruelty of an elemental force, this whirlwind determined our fate” (204). Beautifully written and sometimes surreal.