SLC, 106
Parking lot #7 to Student Life Center
MAP

Her exquisitely wrought, tender memoir of growing up in the Soviet Union…could be taught as a master class in memoir writing.

-The New York Times Book Review

Elena intrigued, informed, and connected with lifelong learners back in 2022 discussing her novel, The Train to Moscow. We’re thrilled to welcome her back for a discussion of her critically acclaimed memoir, A Mountain of Crumbs.

Growing up in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg in a courtyard: a crumbling facade with locked doors and stinking garbage bins behind them as was expected from every Young Pioneer, wearing a red kerchief around her neck, she promised to live, study, and work as a great Lenin bequeathed every citizen to do.

But she harbored a passion that grew into an un-Soviet failing: at age ten she was seduced by the beauty of the English language and spent the next eight years deciphering its secrets, to her mother’s bewilderment. Her mother – born three years before the Soviet state – became a mirror image of her Motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave. A front-line surgeon during WWII, she wanted her daughter to be a doctor and a builder of communism, but Elena, in her mother’s words, was “stubborn as a goat.” What followed as the English Department of Leningrad University, a marriage to a visiting American student, and a scandal, both public and private. After six months of official hurdles and family turmoil, Elena left for America, a ravaged suitcase on the KGB inspector’s table with twenty kilograms of what used to be life. What followed was unknown, and frightening, and filled with mystery. In the United States, Elena received a Doctorate in Language Education and has taught English as a Second Language, Linguistics and Russian at various colleges and universities. She has also written three books. She is married and has a daughter, who is beautiful, talented and smart. And stubborn as a goat.

*Includes light refreshments

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