A hilarious memoir of life under communism and capitalism.

Although women writers have held a conspicuous place in the history of modern Russian literature, they have been slower to find their true voices in exile. Ludmila Shtern, a Soviet émigré to the US, is one marvelous exception. Mixing bittersweet understatement with mordant wit, Shtern’s autobiographical novel is shaped by an ear for a wide range of human voices and by an eye for the savagely funny pain of modern life. Whether buying a car she can’t afford simply because her number came up on a waiting list or enduring a self-actualization workshop, Shtern maintains a cheerful sense of irony and offers, through her personal transit from one life to the next, a tight, witty social history of the two world powers at the end of the Cold War.

Ludmila Shtern began writing early, although she trained as a geologist. In 1975 she emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States. A widely published writer, her work has been reviewed in Time, Le Monde, Slavic, and Moscow Times. Shtern has lectured throughout the United States on women in Russia and contemporary Russian art and literature. She is resident scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center. Her most recent book is Joseph Brodsky: A Personal Memoir.

“An exceptional storyteller…Readers will delight in [her] outrageous, intelligent wit in stories that illuminate, through her specific Soviet history, the increasingly common experience of resettling across borders.”
–Booklist