RUSSIAN TATTOO

In her second memoir, St. Petersburg native Gorokhova (A Mountain of Crumbs, 2010) chronicles a decadeslong clash of cultures between Russia and America.

The author describes the misfortune of being married, against the will of a formidable Stalin-era apartment block of a mother, to a creepy American who wooed her with the thought that Leningrad, as the city was then called, referred to someone other than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. “This is literally Lena’s city, he said, smiling at his own clever manipulation of Russian grammar,” a manipulation involving the possessive form. Possessive: Her husband is nothing but, even if, soon after the papers were signed, he informed her that the marriage would be open. “I didn’t know marriage could be paired with an adjective gutting out the essence of the word’s meaning,” she writes, “but then I didn’t know lots of things.” The years rolled by, and she continued to learn more about her redoubtable mom, who, having “survived the famine, Stalin’s terror, and the Great Patriotic War,” could be as fierce a protector in the new world as in the old. As will happen in America, one marriage gave way to another, and a child arrived and went through all the predictable stages of adolescent rebellion, not least acquiring the tattoo of the title. Still, the same old chores awaited Gorokhova, just as the same kotlety awaited anyone sitting at her table, the “oval-shaped hamburgers” reflecting the cultural collisions that threatened to unmake her life. The tone of the book is tentative, as if Gorokhova is under threat of deportation at any moment, but never meek. The author projects a quiet sense of defiance and provides occasional sharp observations about what it means to be an immigrant in an immigrant society. Overall, however, there are no surprises: The author suffered hard luck and misunderstanding, then redemption of a kind—the usual narrative arc, that is, with a pleasing payoff.

Without the flair of Gary Shteyngart or the urgency of Anna Politkovskaya—of some interest but modestly so.