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is a staff writer at The Washington Post and the author of “To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America.”

RUSSIAN TATtOO

A Memoir

By Elena Gorokhova

Simon & Schuster. 317 pp. $26

In 1980, 24-year-old Elena Gorokhova was flying from her home town of Leningrad toward a new life in the United States when an American in the next seat advised her to return home. “What you’re looking for in the U.S. no longer exists,” he said. “You’ll be happier with your family in Russia.”

Gorokhova’s new memoir, “Russian Tattoo,” explores whether or not he was right. It begins where her first memoir, “A Mountain of Crumbs,” left off, with the ambitious young language teacher accepting an ambivalent marriage proposal from an American exchange student. Though she barely knows him, she has jumped at the chance to escape a society where people queue up for basic foodstuffs and where she and her friends tacitly agree that the communist experiment has failed.

In America, unsurprisingly, the loveless marriage turns sour. Her husband sends the dazed Gorokhova out to get acclimated and seek employment on her own. As she stumbles around “the land of smiling salesclerks and strawberries in December,” adventures in culture shock ensue, by turns painful and funny. Visiting a shoe store on her third day, she notes that, “alarmingly, it is full of shoes.” Coming from a land where “everyone knew that mushrooms must always be cooked,” she is horrified to see Americans blithely eating raw ones, unconcerned that they are about to die.

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She soon remarries — for love this time — pursues a teaching career, and embraces American values such as homeownership and faithful attendance at children’s soccer games. Life in the U.S.S.R. had been “simple if you sliced your soul in half, as you were supposed to,” separating private life from public persona. But as it turns out, in the United States Gorokhova must still slice her soul in half, and now it is no longer so simple.

She settles into suburban New Jersey life only to see the Soviet Union collapse and her friends and family members turn up in America — and in her mother’s case, at her doorstep. Gorokhova spends the next quarter-century playing cultural translator between her Russian mother, a steadfast believer in the Soviet dream who never fully adjusts to the new country, and her American husband and daughter.

Gorokhova’s fluid and evocative prose will be familiar to readers of her first memoir. However, whereas the characters and settings of her Russian life are described in intimate, often visceral detail, their American counterparts tend to be more vague. We could practically hear the young Gorokhova catch her breath as she watched her Ukrainian boyfriend’s tanned body while he hunted for crabs on a Crimean beach. But even as her husband, Andy, is present as the voice of reason or of exasperation when the Russian family drama gets too high-pitched, we get no clear idea of what he looks like, what his quirks are or why she is moved by him.

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Readers of both memoirs may also notice some choice imagery from the first book resurfacing nearly verbatim in the second one. The image of Gorokhova’s mother “cranking the metal handle of a meat grinder until its face erupts in red twists of beef” is striking the first time but lazy when repeated; the recycling seems unnecessary for such an imaginative writer.

Gorokhova is ultimately unable to relinquish her romance with the lost land of her youth, and it becomes clear that despite the greater ease and mobility of life in the United States, she retains a deeper respect for the Russian way of life. “My American self is freshly cheerful and shiny as a newly minted coin. My Russian self is stale and dark, a week-old brick of sour Leningrad bread. It broods and ponders, as it always has, about questions that have no clear answers. . . . The American me is for Andy, his family, and our mutual friends. It is a costume, a disguise. The Russian me is my inheritance, rooted in my veins from birth. The Russian me is for my mother and my sister and my daughter, my blood.”

Yet she is unable to fully embrace her mother, who grows old in the family’s basement apartment as Gorokhova frets about their fraught relationship, “feeling guilty for shutting her out, resenting that she is always here.” She doesn’t fully understand why she keeps her mother at arm’s length, and it is not quite clear why she fears that letting her mother get too close may cause her to “lose the self I have struggled to create.”

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In the end, the question of whether it was better for her to come to the United States or to stay in Russia remains unanswered and unanswerable. Visiting Russia in middle age, Gorokhova realizes that she has become as much of an outsider there as she is in America. “There is no bridge between the two lives . . . there is only a wound, the inner divide of exile.” And yet on that same trip her often rebellious — and very American — daughter ends up showing her where that elusive bridge may lie. It is an unexpected revelation that provides a satisfying end to Gorokhova’s narrative and, for a woman whose life seems so irredeemably bifurcated, offers up a tender stitching together of souls.

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