Manic Bookstore Cafe

This is the week of the year when one should sit and reflect -- what good came of the year just ending? what adventures did we have? what mishaps might have been avoided? what conclusions can be drawn, and how might we proceed more wisely into the year to come? And for what, and whom, do we feel grateful? One of my friends has launched what she calls "The 2013 Gratitude Project" -- twenty-five acts of gratitude in 25 days to mark the year passing. We were excited to receive a "gratitude" package consisting primarily of Christmas cookies, with a lot of love to go with. We made the list in part because I had shared a pot of borscht with her and her family. (I love Darra Goldstein's vegetarian borscht, which includes almost every vegetable you can think of, more even than Molly Katzen's version , and every time I make it I think of how grateful I am to have a Cuisinart, and how useful it would be to have an army of serfs to do the chopping if one didn

So I was talking with a friend today whose grandmother grew up in Russia ... or Ukraine. With Americans, you never really know which. The important thing is that her grandmother was extremely proud to have never eaten a raw vegetable. Ever. In her life. She ate cabbage, beets, potatoes, turnips, onions, even cucumbers -- but only in soup, or pickled, or in some way processed. This is a fascinating thing about Russian (and often Ukrainian) cooking. In some of the research I've been doing I have noticed a tendency to preserve everything. Tomato sauce, fresh salsa, jams and jellies -- and apple pie. I think it must be a genetic fear of the long, cold winter. And it's not limited to those living in the former tsarist lands. I felt it myself this autumn when I arrived back to my house from a half-year of sojourning through Europe and the east coast -- my shelves were empty, and I needed to fill them. So we canned about 12 quarts of tomato sauce, pints of raspberry and bl

My stories of pay-to-play in Ukrainian academic circles are resonating with readers. Some react with surprise, others with their own stories. It seems to me that given the multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic nature of Ukraine, there are probably regional differences to the culture of corruption. My PhD story in the last post  was from Crimea, and my friend and colleague has just shared her own experience with corruption there. Pretty awesome. But before I go on, let me be clear: I really love Ukraine. I have even managed to get out of the Soviet-era habit of calling it The Ukraine in English, as if it were a region rather than a real country. And one of the reasons I know more about it than I might is that in the current era, it's a huge, expensive hassle to get a visa to Russia.  When I began to be invited to Russian-language conferences in Crimea -- in Yalta, for a Chekhov conference, in Alushta to commemorate Alexander Griboedov -- I realize one really great thing about tod

The NPR report   about Ukraine the other day focused on "Dr. Ironfist," the Ukrainian boxer Vitali Klitschko. This leader of the political party UDAR is inherently more trustworthy than most politicians, the journalist claimed, because the boxing champ made his money in sport, not business. I've been watching the events in Ukraine as closely as I can, and I am sending good wishes and energy in the direction of Euromaidan. (I wish I could send hot soup and blankets -- what a time of year to make a revolution!) If we really are watching the birth of a nation , I'll be the first to applaud. But what worries me is precisely the question of corruption, and this is where my experience of Ukraine becomes relevant. My Fulbright "minder" at the Studium Europy Wschodniej in Poland when I arrived January 30 was a young Ukrainian PhD student. In many ways Sasha made my transition to life in Poland easier than it might have been; there is a greater culture gap f

When I think about 1987, I think of my first visit to the Soviet Union, to then Leningrad, where I met some of my best Russian friends and experienced firsthand what Mikhail Gorbachev, in the book we had to read for our classes at Leningrad State University, called "Novoe myshlenie," New Thinking. Glasnost', Perestroika, Demokratiia. Those were the catchwords of 1987. I've been revisiting those years lately for two reasons -- first, I'm teaching Soviet and post-Soviet literature and am trying to explain to my students what those years felt like and what it meant to have literature literally coming to life as the USSR headed to its demise. Secondly, my daughter is doing a graphic novel project for her 9th grade history class. She is supposed to do oral interviews with someone who experienced a big historical event -- and that someone is me. I was there as the Soviet Union began to unravel. I experienced lines and rationing and underground poetry readings that gr

Chatting with Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski last week, we began to reminisce about lines. Funny, since he was born in 1980 and almost didn't experience them in Poland -- at least not the way his parents and grandparents did. He is descended from generations of school teachers (what does it mean that he became a journalist instead?!), and his grandfather was the director of a school. In Communist days that translated into respect. He was a good school director -- fair, open, reliable. And whenever rumors began to go around about some important, desirable product (refrigerators, electric stoves, you name it) that was about to arrive in nearby stores, his neighbors would come knocking on his door. "Will you organize the queue?" they would ask.  This spontaneous, organized queuing was a constant across the Socialist bloc. Someone would keep a list, and according to that list of names a "line" emerged for desirable goods. Often supplemented by actual s

Recently the Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski of Gazeta Wyborcza came to my home university, Ohio State, in Columbus, Ohio. When he discovered that I spent the recent spring semester teaching in Warsaw, he was fascinated. “How did you find Polish students?” he asked. And I got to thinking. My courses at the Studium Europy Wschodniej (Center for Eastern Europe) gave me the opportunity to teach out of two of my recent books. With my undergraduate students, I taught a course entitled War in 20 th Century Russian Culture , and we considered everything from poetry and novels to films, memoirs and monuments in the Russian and Polish experiences of war in the 20 th century. This was a fairly small class, almost a seminar, and I had the students reading chapters of my Chapaev and his Comrades: War and the Literary Hero across the 20 th Century (Academic Studies Press, 2012), so they had the opportunity to practice many of their English-language skills: reading, summarizing

I have to admit it. I'm a fraud. I learned most of my Russian cooking from a truly Soviet girl. Komsomol member, former factory worker, daughter of Udmurt peasants, Nadya taught me much of what I know on the hotplate in the tiny entryway to our Soviet university dormitory blok . Fried potatoes with onions and garlic. Soup made with (yes) potatoes and onions and garlic. I watched her and my other Siberian roommate, Liuda, bake  chicken tabaka or assemble the occasional elaborate salat olivier  for a special meal, but as a committed lacto-ovo vegetarian, I didn't even partake of those beautiful holiday tables. What I mostly learned was how to make bliny  -- Russian pancakes, so light and delicate and buttery that even when they were tiny my children could consume 5 each. They begged for Russian pancakes most mornings, and I made them almost every weekend. Rolled up and filled with jam for my son, American-style (drenched in real maple syrup) and cut into bite-size pieces f

Some of the best Georgian cuisine I've ever eaten was at Tbilisi restaurant in Warsaw (ul. Pulawska, 24) last April. On Yelp there is a helpful review that uses one of my favorite expressions in Russian (and, I guess, in Polish):  teoretycznie. Theoretically, says Amelia K., the restaurant opens at noon. Restauracja Gruzińska  Tbilisi, Warsaw [photo by Amelia K.] Theoretically they also have everything on the menu. But after our absolutely fantastic evening there in April -- when our friend Babs was visiting from the States -- my husband and I went back again for a romantic lunch. Not. Almost everything we ordered was not available that day, including the amazing spinach balls we had been dreaming about for weeks. Recently I've begun preparing the Russian cuisine course I'm offering in spring semester, and it has me thinking about my experiences in Soviet restaurants and cafes. Of course there weren't many options for dining out when I lived in Moscow in the l

I am beginning to wish that like many of my fellow Americans I took pictures of my food. It's hard to do a food-related blog post and not have any photographic evidence! It's shocking that I haven't had a chance to get to the blog in almost six weeks -- I guess that's what teaching full-time does to me and my writing hobby. Not that I haven't been sitting at the computer -- but instead of writing blog posts, I've been responding to student posts (23 a week, with personalized graded responses) and papers (only 5 students in my upper level course, so that's utterly manageable) and presentations. Plus writing up a class observation for a colleague, a letter of reference for another, working on a long-overdue piece on World War One in "post-memory" for my Polish volume editor, and otherwise typing typing typing. And thinking that there's no time left to blog. But I did take the time last week to cook. And it was glorious. Much much chopping, b

This week my university, Ohio State, starts our second academic year on semesters. My 19th year at Ohio State. Yikes. But it doesn't really feel like the second time. Last autumn I was working half-time at the Graduate School and only taught one class -- my students and I met three times a week to talk about Russian poetry. It was fabulously fun, but it doesn't really help me with starting this week. In spring semester I was in Warsaw -- again, great teaching experience, but I taught two courses which met once a week for 90 minutes each. Not particularly helpful as I prepare to teach my two undergraduate Russian literature courses this semester -- especially since the autumn semester will actually last about 16 weeks. One thing from last autumn will help -- I remember telling my students that as compared to quarters we were bound to experience several lulls, when we became sick of each other and the course material. I do feel that it's important to prepare -- and control

I am an enthusiast. There's no doubt about it. When I read something, go somewhere, learn about something, I want to try. I want to share. I want to do it again and again. Since I'm a New York Times reader and an amateur cook, this does not always go well. This week, for example, I tried making jam for the first time (with blackberries, not the NYT recipe blueberries, and the jury is out on whether it jelled or not...). I also made coconut cardamom panna cotta (a true flop). But the sweet corn blini were a hit. Oh wow. We joined our CSA again, Patchwork Gardens , and I picked up the first box of veggies today. The result? Russian-style cucumber and heirloom cherry tomato salad (yum), sauteed zucchini and summer squash with honey and mint (interesting), and sweet corn blini. To be fair, the corn didn't come with the CSA share. But having read the blini recipe the other day, I headed straight for the Brentlinger Farm truck after picking up my beets, tomatoes, onions