![]() ![]() ![]() She sheltered us from dangers, experience, and life itself by a tight embrace that left us innocent and gasping for air. ![]() What had happened to her was not going to happen to us. A survivor of the famine, Stalin's terror, and the Great Patriotic War, she controlled and protected, ferociously. She presided in our kitchen over a pot of borsch, a ladle in her hand, ordering us to eat in the same voice that made her anatomy students quiver. Our house was the seat of the politburo, my mother its permanent chairman. She came from where they lick plates.īorn three years before Russia turned into the Soviet Union, my mother became a mirror image of my motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave. She came from the provincial town of Ivanovo in central Russia, where chickens lived in the kitchen and a pig squatted under the stairs, where streets were unpaved and houses made from wood. Leningrad's sophistication would have infected her the moment she drew her first breath, and all the curved façades and stately bridges, marinated for more than two centuries in the city's wet, salty air, would have left a permanent mark of refinement on her soul.īut she didn't. I wish my mother had come from Leningrad, from the world of Pushkin and the tsars, of granite embankments and lace ironwork, of pearly domes buttressing the low sky. ![]()
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