Mother Winter by Sophia Shalmiyev
This vividly awesome and truly great (Eileen Myles) memoir follows award-winning writer Sophia Shalmiyev's flight from the Soviet Union, where she was forced to abandon her estranged mother, and the subsequent quest to find her again. Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Sophia Shalmiyev was raised in the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). An imbalance of power and the prevalence of antisemitism in her homeland led her father to steal Shalmiyev away, emigrating to America, abandoning her estranged mother, Elena. At age eleven, Shalmiyev found herself on a plane headed west, motherless and terrified of the new world unfolding before her. Now a mother herself, in Mother Winter, an exploration of heartache and the ways life moves on even after irretrievable changes (Booklist), Shalmiyev depicts in urgent vignettes her emotional journeys as an immigrant, an artist, and a woman raised without her mother. She tells of her early days in St. Petersburg; her tumultuous pit-stop in Italy as a refugee; the life she built for herself in the Pacific Northwest, raising two children of her own; and ultimately, her voyage back to Russia as an adult, where she searched endlessly for the alcoholic mother she never knew. Braided into her physical journey is a metaphorical exploration of the many surrogate mothers Shalmiyev sought out in place of her own, woven together with lyrical prose... that] splits open like layer after layer of an ornate matryoshka (The Paris Review). Mother Winter is the story of Shalmiyev's years of travel, searching, and forging meaningful connections with the worlds she occupies--the result is a rich tapestry of autobiography and meditations on feminism, motherhood, art, and culture, this book is as intellectually satisfying as it is artistically profound. A sharply intelligent, lyrically provocative memoir (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
Shalmiyev, Sophia: -
Sophia Shalmiyev emigrated from Leningrad to NYC in 1990. An MFA graduate of Portland State University, she was the nonfiction editor for the Portland Review and is a recipient of the Laurels Scholarship and numerous Kellogg's Fellowship awards. She has a second master's degree in creative arts therapy from the School of Visual Arts, previously counseling survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking. Her work has appeared in Vela Magazine, Entropy, Electric Lit, the Seattle Review of Books, Ravishly, and the Literary Review, among others; all with a feminist lens. She lives in Portland with her two children. Mother Winter is her first book.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781501193088 |
| ISBN 10 | 1501193082 |
| Title | Mother Winter |
| Author | Sophia Shalmiyev |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
| Year published | 2019-02-12 |
| Number of pages | 288 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |