cover image Russian Tattoo: A Memoir

Russian Tattoo: A Memoir

Elena Gorokhova. Simon & Schuster, $26 (336) ISBN 978-1451689822

Gorokhova, the author of A Mountain of Crumbs, a memoir of growing up in Soviet Russia, recreates, in this engaging new work, her first experience of America in 1980 as a 20-something teacher who hastily married an American academic. She admits she was simply eager to get away from the controlling clutches of her motherland—and her mother. With wry, unswervingly honest observer’s eye, Gorokhova chronicles the increasing strangeness of her new country as she is overwhelmed by choices at the shoe store and the supermarket in Austin, Tex., where she lives with her husband Robert, who is unemotional and detached. She goes on interviews in a homespun sundress, trying to hide her sense of being “marked” as a Soviet exile, a “person with a dubious past.” Gorokhova is eventually sent to live with Robert’s psychotherapist mother in Princeton, N.J., and there, she falls in love with the more understanding Andy. With Andy’s encouragement, she quits working as a server at Beefsteak Charlie’s (she is embarrassingly bad at it) and starts teaching English to Russian immigrants at a business institute in New York City. This work from a young immigrant’s point of view is both wondrous and stinging. [em](Jan.) [/em]