by Elena S. Smith, 2006
As we often do when we enjoy an author’s latest novel, we go deeper into their catalog. Such was the case with my decision to read Why Birches Are White—Elena S. Smith’s first book, written in 2006. Elena is a colleague and local Spokane author, and a retired English professor from Washington State University. From our conversations, I knew it was a mix of fact and fiction. I wanted to learn more about her growing up in the USSR/Russia, spending her early adult years there, being educated there, and marrying and raising her son there. She experienced some groundbreaking historical events having to do with the Soviet Union and the United States, and her early exposure to Americans, America, and the American way of life are described with frankness and honesty in this book.
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Elena grew up in President Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union (preceded primarily by Leonid Brezhnev), until the time of the country’s dissolution in 1991. Gorbachev was the primary architect of glasnost (openness), demokratizatsiya (democratization), and perestroika (restructuring), which ultimately led to the undermining of the communist one-party state. In partnership with the US President Ronald Reagan, he helped limit nuclear weapons and was instrumental in ending the Cold War.
It was during this atmosphere of hope and relative peace that a singular event took place not only in the Soviet Union but in Elena’s life. During the summer of 1987, a Peace Walk was scheduled that included approximately 265 everyday American and 200 Soviet citizens between Leningrad and Moscow. This on-foot, 400-mile walk was a symbolic gesture aimed at “ending an arms race nobody wants.” Elena’s friend Nadya was part of the organizing committee between the Americans coming over and the Moscow delegation, and her enthusiasm was infectious. She was a fast talker, and before you know it, Elena had committed to this 400-mile walk, but only on the condition that she could bring her 8-year-old son. (A full account of this unprecedented historical event and documentary film can be found at www.ourmove.org).
The first American participant Elena greets as they arrive at the airport is a man named Stan from Idaho, another educator like Elena. He gives a bad first impression by talking her ear off and she can’t wait to get away from him. She wonders: are all Americans obnoxious chatterboxes like this guy??
But Elena’s first impression slowly turns around as she gets to know Stan better. They circle each other and tiptoe around the idea that they might be getting interested. The rest of the book details a passionate but volatile love story complicated by the fact that both of them are married, have children, and live half a world apart so they rarely see each other. Their love affair is propped up by letters, phone calls, surprise gifts, and as many visits as they can manage while they avoid discussing the inevitable—for seven years.
In between the drama of the Elena/Stan relationship, we are gifted with a rare snapshot of daily life in the Soviet Union that we don’t often see on this side of the world. The failures of communism are on full display. Elena describes her first day in the US, in Bethesda, Maryland, and going to a grocery store with her hostess Pam—the “powerful shock” it was:
“Tears came to my eyes when I saw a shelf about a half a mile long filled up with an amazing variety of cheeses from all over the world. My heart squeezed with pain when I thought about my poor Russian compatriots, mostly women, standing in lines for hours to buy at least one kind of cheese…My brother and I told Pam how our mother had spent half of her life standing in lines for food. We had an interesting discussion and in the end all three of us agreed that communism had failed primarily because it could not supply people with such simple things as food and clothes.”
Later, in the 1990s, she describes a coupon system that was developed to ration things like butter, sugar, flour, soap, and vodka. The coupons allocated certain quantities of these items and you purchased them whether you needed them or not, because either the coupons or the grocery items could disappear at any time. But often the hoarded items, such as flour or pasta, would get infested with bugs. On the flip side, if you were a big vodka drinker and ran through your vodka ration quickly, you might become desperate for more vodka coupons. If you weren’t a vodka drinker, then vodka coupons became a valuable commodity on the black market. For those who were selling the “magic blue vodka coupons, the price of one vodka coupon was equal to the price of a Panasonic boom box or a Kodak camera.”
I enjoyed this book for so many reasons. It gave me a glimpse into a life and culture that is completely foreign to me and foreign to most Americans. We live a life of privilege here. Unless we are touched by extreme poverty, most of us never experience the day-to-day hardships and lack of freedoms described here under a communist regime. It’s an eye-opening read.
But in another sense, the book just reemphasized to me how people are the same everywhere. The heart wants what it wants. We all want to be loved, respected, and cherished, and we all wither and become vulnerable if we are ignored or treated with indifference or contempt. These things are universal in the human experience.
There’s something magical in knowing that an American man can meet a Russian woman on a random day during a random peace walk and it changes the course of their lives forever. I highly recommend Why Birches Are White.
