"Although women writers have held a conspicuous place in the history of modern Russian literature, they have been slow to find their true voices in exile. Ludmila Shtern, a geologist/writer who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1975, offers a completely fresh, unsentimental look at daily life in the former Soviet Union and in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century.

Her memoir, part comic bildungsroman, part picaresque adventure, shows its heroine, Tatyana Dargis, growing up in the U.S.S.R., falling in love, running afoul of the KGB, and finally moving to the United States where capitalist rather than communist absurdities prevail."--BOOK JACKET.