Manic Bookstore Cafe

In everyone's life there is a teacher who motivated her to try harder, strive for more, reach beyond. Or in my case, a teacher who teased, goaded, poked, pried, laughed, lampooned, and somehow created an atmosphere where I was ready to work my tail off to make him proud. Randy Nolde, we will miss you. Mr. Nolde was my Russian teacher in high school. I first got to know him as a younger person -- the Russian Club Banquet was quite the event in my home town, and my grandmother used to take us regularly even before my sister enrolled in Russian language class. Every year, the high school cafeteria underwent a magical metamorphosis. Huge murals of scenes from Russia -- fantastic, colorful onion-domed churches, and young peasants reaping wheat, and Armenian maidens with long braids and colorful costumes -- hung all around the edges of the room. On the menu: chicken Kiev made by the cafeteria ladies, supplemented with cafeteria salad, but also khachapuri  and piroshki  made b...

"Smell the aroma of literature." I've been thinking about this graphic for some time -- a great sign for a venue like the Manic Bookstore Cafe. A bunch of dill, usually tied with a string. This past semester, teaching my upper level language students, I hit upon what turned out to be a brilliant essay topic. Building on a line from Pushkin's prologue to Ruslan and Liudmila , I asked the students to write an essay called "The Smells of Russia." Each student took a different approach, from drawing on our reading of Chekhov and talking about buttery pancakes, to remembering their own study abroad experiences and the foods they tasted in Russia, to googling "smells of Russia" and describing urine-soaked stairwells and unwashed masses in crowded subway cars. My favorite essay used the scent of dill. When you chop dill, as we did during our cooking day at the end of January (right in the midst of the polar vortex) the scent fills the room, a...