Subtitle: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria
Recommended to me by: Ceil Wirth on the EEFC mailing list
Kapka Kassabova’s chilling, yet engaging, personal memoir of growing up in communist Bulgaria, and then returning to visit shortly after Bulgaria joined the European Union. The characters are finely drawn, and each chapter covers a different aspect (home, school, summers) in overlapping chronologies. The childhood section focuses primarily on Sofia, the capital, and the adult section covers all the regions of Bulgaria, shading into travelogue more than memoir. Woven around personal details, she covers history, current events, communism, capitalism, and ever-present tensions and truces between different ethnicities (Bulgarians, Turks, Macedonians, Greeks).
Her family emigrated to New Zealand when Kassabova was 18, and the book was written in English and published in the US, with the occasional New Zealand turn of phrase.
Kassabova is a few years younger than I am. While she was growing up with her sister and parents in a 2-room (not 2 bedrooms, 2 rooms total) apartment, struggling for food and boots and sometimes electricity and water, I was growing up with relative plenty, vaguely aware but mostly oblivious of others’ struggles.
Coincidentally we also visited Bulgaria at around the same time in 2007, although I only went to Sofia and Bansko. We visited many of the same attractions in those places, and I appreciated learning more details about them. For example, I drank from the mineral spring in the center of Sofia, but didn’t know that it flooded the main street when they first accidentally dug into it.
My attention wandered occasionally while reading, but overall I recommend this book highly as a memoir and a source of information about Bulgaria then and now.
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