Story Synopsis from A MOUNTAIN OF CRUMBS website:

A Mountain of Crumbs is the story of a young Soviet girl’s discovery of the hidden truths of adulthood and her country’s profound, brazen lies.  The narrator recreates the world that both oppressed and inspired her.  She recounts stories passed down to her about the horrors of Stalin’s terror and the Great Patriotic War and probes the daily deprivations and small joys of her family’s life in Leningrad.

Elena, like most around her, routinely slices her soul in half – one for herself, the other for the outside world.  Controlled by the state the same way she is controlled by her mother, she learns early to play the national game of vranyo, or pretending.  “They pretend to pay us,” says her older sister, an actress, summing up Soviet life, “and we pretend to work.”  But when her father falls ill, pretending fails to hold them together, and his death leads to the family’s gradual unraveling.  In search of another life, Elena learns English and finds escape in books and theatre.   But what she is really trying to escape is her mother, as authoritarian, sheltering, and difficult to leave as her Motherland.  Their suffocating nurture exacts a price, and when Elena upsets the expected order, she becomes an outcast.  Her marriage to an American causes a scandal, public and private.  Through the narrator’s captivating voice, we learn not only the story of Russian life in the second half of the twentieth century, but also the story of one rebellious citizen whose love of a foreign language finally transports her into a new world.

Elena Gorokhova grew up in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, in a courtyard that became a more accurate emblem for the Soviet life than the ubiquitous hammer and sickle: a crumbling façade with locked doors and stinking garbage bins behind them.  But she harbored a passion for the beauty of the English language and spent the next eight years deciphering its secrets at Leningrad English school # 238.  What followed was the English Dept. of Leningrad University, a marriage to a visiting American student, and a scandal.  After six months of official hurdles and family turmoil, Elena left for America.  In the United States, Elena received a Doctorate in Language Education and has taught  at various New Jersey universities.  After taking Frank McCourt’s memoir workshop in 2004, she recalibrated everything she’d written about her Soviet life and turned it into A Mountain of Crumbs.