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Liked It “In August 1931 a fifteen-year-old is attending high school in Santa Monica, California. By year's end she would be living in a Moscow commune, miles from her family, learning a new skill in a factory. She would spend the next 34 years of her life in the USSR. This is her story. I couldn't put it...” see full review » see other reviews » |
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“In August 1931 a fifteen-year-old is attending high school in Santa Monica, California. By year's end she would be living in a Moscow commune, miles from her family, learning a new skill in a factory. She would spend the next 34 years of her life in the USSR. This is her story. I couldn't put it down.
Ron B wrote this review Sunday, February 22 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Mary Leder's father was a carpenter, who moved his family from New York to California. He couldn't sell the houses he built, as the Great Depression--what in the USSR was called the "economic crisis of capitalism--impacted him negatively. Her parents had been left wing sympathizers, believing the USSR was the wave of the future. Her father was born in the Ukrainian, emigrating to the USA in 1907 to escape the repression and pogroms of Jewish residents. Mary was a member of the Communist Youth Group and was more militant in her views than her parents. As she says, these were beliefs and feelings, not facts. Proof positive that we are defined far more by our beliefs than our knowledge!
In 1931 the family boarded a Japanese freighter to make their way, eventually, to Birobidzhan, a heavily Jewish area of the USSR. Her father believed that there was no unemployment in the USSR, and life would be better for his family. There are many interesting observations Mary recounts in these memoirs contrasting the difference between life then in the USSR vs. America. When they arrived, a horse drawn carriage took their luggage and Mary was bewildered as to why the horse wasn't wearing blinders. Her father informed her that since there was no auto traffic on the streets, the horses didn't need blinders. She illustrates her absurd expectations of life in the USSR with how she brought along a tennis racquet.
You'll learn the difference between a commune and a collective; what it was like for Mary to be a member of the Komsomol, USSR's youth group (which she resigned from in 1947) and why she never was made member of the Communist Party; her life at Moscow University, and how intellectually deprived students were for books and opinions that differed from the orthodox Marxist-Leninist party line; and why having an individual doorbell was considered "bourgeois individualism." Mary would meet the Soviet Intelligent agent that recruited Whittaker Chambers, live in the same Building in Moscow with Ho Chi Minh.
Her parents became disillusioned with the difficult life, not to mention the repression against Jews, and left the USSR for America in 1933. But Mary couldn't get out, since she had been granted citizenship by the USSR when she was 18, unbeknownst to her. She wouldn't see her parents again until a visit in 1957. Eventually, she married, lived in Berlin for one year with her husband, who was in the Army. They gave birth to a daughter, which died at 7 1/2 months. She became totally disillusioned with the USSR in the mid-1940s, but couldn't get out until 1965, six years after her husband died from illness.
The amazing thing about life in the USSR is just how materialistic it is. Everyone obsesses over material things, especially anything foreign. The press constantly published progress towards The Five Year Plans, citing factory quotas, production statistics. Yet capitalism is blamed for being materialistic. I suppose the difference is capitalism just quietly delivers what people want and need whereas in the USSR you had to scrape and scavenge for even the basic necessities of life.
The rise of anti-semitism during World War II, and especially afterwards, is well explained. Mary writes: "The assertion that the Jews were not trusted because they were perceived as disloyal is putting the cart before the horse. It was because the Jews were distrusted and discriminated against, despite years of loyal service to the regime, that so many finally became disillusioned and discontented."
After Stalin's death in 1953, the people of the USSR had a glimmer of hope of reform, but by then Mary was a nonbeliever. This book is best summed up by what she wrote in the last chapter: "This is not a fairy tale in which good triumphs over evil and everyone lives happily ever after."
If the book The Forsaken (reviewed herein) is the macro story of Americans who emigrated to the USSR during the 1930s, this book is a micro story of one girl. It is simply written, compelling, engrossing, and riveting, a history that needs to be told about an evil empire--one that never should be forgotten. ”
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