A review by greeniezona
How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulić

4.0

I don't really recall how this book made its way into my collection. Though given the topic, I suspect my sister, Jessa, may have been involved. This book is a collection of essays about what life was like for women in Eastern Europe under Communist regimes. These stories are mostly about deprivation: sharing small apartments with multiple families, the changing availability of toilet paper, repairing nylons over and over and over again, hoarding food, supplies, even plastic bags, because you never know when they will disappear from the stores. A Western reporter visits, and notes in her article as a sign of their deprivation that women still wash their clothing in tubs of boiling water here, and Drakulić is annoyed, devoting an entire essay to laundry.

There is some devoted to the consequences of communism that are already familiar to us -- the censors, the party line, the extensive wire-tapping, the government-controlled media. But precisely because these are the known stories, Drakulić brings them all back to how they affect women. It takes a while to sink in that no matter how many Cold Ware movies we've seen, no matter how many fat Russian novels we've read, these stories are new. Even now, ten years after it was written, this book is still a revelation.

Spoiler: There's not really a whole lot of laughter.