![]() ![]() Most of the novel takes place in Russia, where food is scarce - food scarcity is always an issue whenever you hear about life in Soviet times, of course. Rosa was raised in an orphanage where she learned Russian and forgot the tartar language, culture, and cooking of her vaguely remembered parents. ![]() In the novel, Rosa's daughter Sulfia, Sulfia's daughter Aminat, her husband (who leaves her and she scarcely cares), and several lovers and other contacts all are seen through her self-absorbed, self-serving, and sometimes cruel eyes, and as a result it's also hard to be very sympathetic to them or to her. I don't know if this difference has anything to do with the unlikeableness of this character. ![]() Bronsky's family left Russia for Germany, unlike most of the other immigrant writers I've read - who live in New York, mainly. Rosa, the narrator of Alina Bronsky's novel The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is for me one of the least sympathetic characters of this newish literary school (if you can call it that). These Russian emigrants, as I've noted before, offer us a variety of insights into how they adjusted (or didn't adjust) to their new schools, environments, material possessions, and to the problems of assimilation that their parents faced. Now we know that among these children were a large number of gifted writers. As the Soviet Socialist Empire disintegrated, large numbers of Jewish refugees fled from their impoverished, discriminatory, and increasingly erratic life there, often taking young and impressive children with them. ![]()
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