Maria Tumarkin

#ReadAroundTheWorld”. #Ukraine

”I left too early, I missed the whole point. I was not there when my generation was cornered by history.”

This is the memoir of a woman returning to her home country of Ukraine with her 12 year old Australian-born daughter Billie. Maria left Ukraine as a 15 year-old, with her Jewish family, in 1989, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. Returning twenty years later to show Billie her homeland creates the opportunity to reconnect with family and friends but also to examine the seismic sociopolitical changes the country had undergone.

Tumarkin makes comments on communism, politics, feminism and quotes many Russian and Ukrainian poets and writers. She observes and makes interesting comments on the way women around her dress and behave.
“Women dressed as if being guided by comfort and self-restraint in choosing their clothes was an insult to the very idea of femininity. You can always pick the non-Russians in this crowd; they are the ones who leave their killer heels, their yummy pants and their volumising mascara for special occasions, not realising that life is passing them by as they prance around in their fisherman pants and their Converse sneakers…for at least one hundred years women have been the stronger sex, when it counts, in Russia. To them the idea that lipsticks and heels are tools of oppression sounds desperately foreign. For decades it was the very absence of such items from Russian stores, and the resulting need to hunt far and wide for them or to go without, that women found oppressive.”

She also makes astute observations on the feminism of communism, the equality yet disproportionate burden. “For many decades, the official Soviet rhetoric of equality and emancipation was maintained against a backdrop of actual startling inequality coupled with an unquestioning expectation of women's readiness for self-sacrifice. Yes, there were countless women engineers and women doctors in the Soviet Union at a time when their Western stepsisters were left to contend with the 'teacher, nurse or secretary' trifecta. During World War II Soviet women did not just bandage the wounded or manufacture ammunitions, they led tank divisions and operated machine guns…The 'glass ceiling' may have been well and truly broken for Soviet women, but the shards of the shattered glass lodged themselves in every aspect of women's everyday existence…Soviet women were repeatedly told how far they had come compared to their bourgeois counterparts – after all, the existence of the vast majority of tragically domesticated Western women was summed up by the Three K's in the atavistic German slogan popular under Hitler: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church). The irony, of course, was that neither Kinder nor Küche had disappeared from the equation for 'liberated' Soviet women, while the Party was to prove far more demanding and omnipresent than the Kirche. Women were essentially the slaves of the slaves, with little leisure to contemplate the difficulties of their two-tier subjugation. It was not a question of wanting it all, but rather of doing it all – work, children, housework, community work and sex.”

She also visits Babi Yar, the site of the largest single massacre during the Holocaust, where at least thirty-three thousand Jewish men, women and children were murdered in two days in 1941.

The book details honestly her struggles with, and expectations of her daughter Billie. I found it to be a well-written memoir that deals with the personal and provides insights into the atrocities and millions of deaths under Stalin and the turbulence of post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine. It did become overly introspective and analytical at times and drag a little at some points. 4 stars.… (meer)

It’s synchronicity: this week Karen at BookerTalk posted about her ‘bad habit’ of buying non-fiction books that she never gets round to reading and here I am reviewing a book that very nearly fell into that category…

Karen identifies some possible reasons for behaving in this somewhat irrational way. It can be because of a desire to know more about some issue than is accessible in the media, or it can be a ‘vain attempt’ to keep up with some issue of importance. Some of my neglected NF books fall into this category: I have half a dozen books about terrorism that represent my vague unease with how the media distorts this issue, and yes, those ones survived the Tidy-the-Bookshelves cull. But they have not yet jumped out of the shelves demanding to be read. No, it’s those pushy author bios that do that – and probably always will…

But others on Karen’s NF TBR, like mine – including some very recent purchases – are unlikely ever to be read and there appears to be no rational reason for buying them, other than that I thought I ought to. They’re not there to impress anybody: these books are tucked away on the shelves in my library, a private space in my house and a room very rarely visited by my friends.

But perhaps one other reason might be the influence of the zeitgeist – which is why I think I’ve had Maria Tumarkin’s Traumascapes on my TBR for ages and ages. This book was everywhere in the year of its publication in 2005: there were author interviews in the media, reviews all over the place, author events at bookstores, and if memory serves me correctly, festival appearances too.

Quite unexpectedly, now that I’ve finally read it, I found myself having reservations about this much-lauded book. (And, to be honest, I have some qualms about saying so). Charlotte Wood was troubled by the lack of structure in the book in her review for The Age but I was more bothered by the tone.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/03/17/traumascapes-by-maria-tumarkin/… (meer)