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Anya von bremzen books6/25/2023 ![]() ![]() A sample: “Lenin, incidentally, transmigrated from this distant, idealized Spirithood into warm and fuzzy dedushka-hood during the Brezhnevian phase of his cult. I might have settled into her memoir as a sad but well-researched tale were it not for her writing style. But sadly even in the closing pages her memory of Victory Day celebrations during her 2011 trip to Moscow were less celebration and more Requiem: “In the dreadful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison lines in Leningrad …” Nearing 100 pages with famine and death the ongoing themes I thought perhaps the reviewers had experienced what Daniel Kahneman termed the Peak-End rule: maybe a wonderful resolution to the story overshadowed chapter after chapter of harsh detail. I had been anticipating Julie and Julia and was instead assailed by Stalin and Hitler. The Seige of Leningrad and Hitler’s Hunger Plan are only a couple of examples she draws from in the last century. It ran a distant second to Russia’s grim history. The title seemed to suggest that Soviet cooking was the main subject matter. Based on the cheery yellow cover with a smiling girl and the reviews of ‘delicious’ and ‘rollicking’ I was expecting a happy romp through Von Bremzen’s foodie recollections. ![]()
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