Is it a history of the Soviet Union and its Yeltsin/Putinesque denouement? Is it, as its subtitle hints, ''a memoir of longing''? When you have finished the reading, you realise it would have been a lesser book if it were only one of these. It is the weaving of all these narrative threads that give it its uniqueness and value.
Von Bremzen is a food writer, and food, even often the lack of it, comes and goes throughout the book as the measure of life over the 70 years of the Soviet Union's existence. Each chapter covers a decade and features a particular Russian culinary idiosyncrasy. Recipes for each featured dish are included in the last part of the book, replete with detailed notes and stories.
Each decade also illustrated events in the life of the writer's extended family, in particular its fears and favours in the Stalin years, during which her grandfather held a post of responsibility in the ''intelligence'' service that gave them privileges others did not enjoy.
Within that family, so colourfully and warmly described, von Bremzen's hero was, and is, her mother Larisa, a woman of great courage and resourcefulness with a passion for food. For Russians, food always goes with company: eating and drinking is an opportunity to engage in reminiscing, making jokes and toasts, for endless ''philosophising''. Even when food was short, this sociability never ceased.
In 1974 Larisa and von Bremzen emigrated to the United States, ostensibly to treat von Bremzen's scleroderma (that turned out to be insignificant). Since then von Bremzen has returned to Russia a number of times at irregular intervals, but, as she makes clear, it is the Soviet Union of her early childhood that has remained dear to her heart.
The very difficulties of those years, the deprivations, were offset by the resourcefulness of Larisa and the humour that Russians inject into everyday life, a life so often marked with tragedy. And this is a book larded with Russian sardonic humour - jokes abound. For example Gorbachev, for whom von Bremzen has complex sympathies, himself remembers a joke at his expense during his anti-alcohol campaign in the 1980s.
After waiting for hours in line outside a bottle shop a man mutters that he's going off to the Kremlin to kill Gorbachev. After a while he returns to the queue complaining that the queue outside the Kremlin to kill the Soviet leader was longer than the one outside the bottle store!
Despite her success as a food writer and the many years she has lived in the United States, von Bremzen obviously had to write this book to tell the story of her family, but above all to assuage her longing (toska, in Russian, meaning a sad yearning, more of the body than nostalgia) for the country of her birth, particularly over the Soviet years with their traumatic upheavals, privations and triumphs against adversity, both those engendered from outside as well as inside the country.
Her visits to Putin's Russia towards the end of the book only emphasise her feelings of being a stranger in her own land.
This book is a must for foodies and anyone wanting to understand the enigma that is Russia from the inside, from the cramped kitchens of the Soviet Union, rather than from the desk of the political scientist.
- Peter Stupples is a former University of Otago associate professor of Russian studies.
