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...

At last, queuing has come to my small Ohio town. It's Saturday morning, and I sit here in my study, listening to the birds and the lawnmowers, feeling shock and awe at the merging of two worlds. Not often do my Soviet experiences translate into my American life. I remember when I first arrived in the Soviet Union as a 21-year-old, and people asked me: "what did you expect to find? bears wandering the streets?" I would simply reply: "nothing. I had no expectations. I came to find whatever was here." And it was a rich and sometimes bewildering experience. Recently my daughter wrote a graphic novel for history class about me. She needed a person to interview who had lived through a "historic event," so we chose perestroika and the demise of the Soviet system. Certainly my stories seemed exotic to her -- standing in line, being chastised on the street by grandmothers who thought I should be wearing a warmer hat, standing in line, having my mail arri...

It's almost the last day of May, and it finally feels like May. This winter was a tough one for many in central Ohio (and in other places across the world). As a writer and educator, I'm always in favor of new vocabulary words, but "polar vortex" was one I could have done without. Even more bitter, then, that it snowed through mid-April and that the first half of May was colder and wetter than usual. On May 17 there were still few leaves on the trees, and I stood in the cold rain at my daughter's conference track meet watching hail bounce off the track. The cold winter echoed the feeling of cold war that emerged in the weeks after the Russian Olympics. I can barely remember my concerns about the dangers of terrorist attacks in Sochi, given what has transpired in Crimea and eastern Ukraine since then. Yesterday I heard the song "Get Lucky" in a shop in my town and was transported back to the week in February when I watched the Russian Police Ch...

When I was in middle school, I enrolled in French class. We were permitted to choose our own names, and for some reason I was reborn as Vivienne (in 7th grade). And then  Annick (in 8th). And eventually Angelique (in high school). We learned the usual stuff: J'habite à Paris.   C'est mon frère. Où est le Louvre? But we also learned that language and culture can be imbibed through food. Yours truly, fourth from left, in 1979 Mme. Sandburg told us tales of her year in Paris, when she had very little money and would often buy a can of peaches to eat on a park bench, pretending that the drunk on the next bench wasn't drooling in his sleep and that her near-starvation was somehow romantic rather than debilitating. She coached us on our irregular verbs and introduced a couple of different tenses, and she brought us to triumph on a National French Exam, where as I recall I scored about 7th in the country in knowledge of 1st year French language. So I was clearly imbib...

On Tuesday, April 15, it snowed. Needless to say, this plunged many of my students, coworkers, and family members into despair. Never mind that spring has  to come some time -- they remained convinced that the winter would never end. So I decided to pull out all the stops. Oddly, this week has been Passover as well as Easter Week for both Orthodox and other Christians. Can't remember the last time that happened. For Russians, this should mean the last week of "fasting" foods, i.e. foods without animal products. I went to one of my Russian recipe go-to sites, gotovim-doma.ru, to find a recipe for the lark-shaped breads that are guaranteed to usher in spring weather. On Wednesday, I baked twenty  zhavoronki . (I meant to take pictures, but apparently did not.) The dough was a "fasting" dough, i.e. used water, yeast and flour, but no eggs or milk, and was phenomenally easy to manipulate into little birds. Just doing my part to make spring arrive -- and now i...

About a month ago my students were giving presentations of their own research. They chose excellent topics: Russian holidays, and the foods that accompany them; French influences on Russian cuisine (and vice versa); traditions of tea drinking; feasting and fasting; the Leningrad blockade. Boris Kustodiev, "Merchant's Wife," 1918 The visuals were terrific as well. From the serious (images of the bread rations during the siege of Leningrad) to the informative (a diagram of the different parts of a samovar) to the gorgeous (Kustodiev's tea drinking merchant's wife -- everyone's favorite "edible" feast). I am not the first to comment on the merchant's wife's shoulders or to notice that they are as appetizing as the ripe red watermelon or the puffy white clouds in that blue blue sky. (Why, I wonder, is this his most famous painting? Is it the accoutrements à la Russe such as the brass samovar? or the obviously satisfied wife, who has ever...