A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir by Elena Gorokhova, 2010, 350pp
Elena Gorokhova’s A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir is the moving story of a Soviet girl who discovers the truths adults are hiding from her and the lies her homeland lives by. Elena’s country is no longer the majestic Russia of literature or the tsars, but a nation struggling to retain its power and its pride. Born with a desire to explore the world beyond her borders, Elena finds her passion in the complexity of the English language—but in the Soviet Union of the 1960s such a passion verges on the subversive. Elena is controlled by the state the same way she is controlled by her mother, a mirror image of her motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave. In the battle between a strong-willed daughter and her authoritarian mother, the daughter, in the end, must break free and leave in order to survive.
Request a book: The library will coordinate the purchase of books. Copies are available at a subsidized price of $5. If you would like a copy, email Tina Ulrich (tulrich@nmc.edu.) If you are going to find your own copy but want to be included in the discussion, email Tina to be added to the list. We will notify you when copies arrive.
Save the date (book discussion): Friday, Nov. 16 – noon to 1:30pm, Lobdell’s, A Teaching Restaurant (NMC Great Lakes Campus)