She had my gently wavy black hair, a slender nose and a bright look on her face. She hadn’t inherited any of the sluggishness or ugliness of her mother. The sublimely defiant Aminat is born nine months later on a cold December night at Birthing Center Number 134, and Rosa falls in love with the dark-eyed child who shares her Tartar features: “Must have been twins,” says Klavida, the woman who was paid to abort only one baby. Sulfia miscarries one child and Rosa is satisfied with her labors until she notices Sulfa’s stomach begin to round. The novel begins with a hot mustard bath and a bloody knitting needle as Rosa tries her best to end her “stupid,” 17-year-old daughter Sulfia’s pregnancy. “Uplifting, surprising, spot on.Rosa Achmetowna, the unapologetically manipulative, judgmental and unruly Tartar matriarch in Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, makes “tiger mother” Amy Chua look like a pushover.
A book that, after you finish it, you immediately want to start to read again.”- Stuttgarter Zeitung “Irony, subtle humor, fascinating characters. Max, over the course of the story, will appreciate that people’s questionable behaviour may often be motivated by sadness. Here the best-selling and internationally renowned author, while never abandoning her trademark and razor-sharp wit, tells a family story through a young boy’s eyes. While Max’s grandmother recalls the outrageously nasty Rosa from Bronsky’s best-selling book, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, this is a more tender and moving family portrait. Everybody will have to learn to defend themselves from Max’s all-powerful grandmother.Īlina Bronsky writes of family dysfunction and machinations with a droll and biting humor, a tremendous ear for dialog, and a generous heart that is forgiving of human weakness.
When a child is born to Nina that is the spitting image of Max’s grandfather, things come to a hilarious if dramatic head.
While he may be a dolt in his grandmother's eyes, Max is bright enough to notice that his stoic and taciturn grandfather has fallen hopelessly in love with their neighbor, Nina. His grandmother has been telling Max that he is an incompetent, clueless weakling since he was a child and she’d spend the day sitting in the back of his classroom to be sure he came to no harm.
But she is not at all pleased with how things are run in Germany: the doctors and teachers are incompetent, the food is toxic, and the Germans are generally untrustworthy. When his grandmother-a terrifying, stubborn matriarch and a former Russian primadonna-moved them from the Motherland it was in search of a better life. Max lives with his grandparents in a residential home for refugees in Germany. From the acclaimed author of The Hottest Dishes Of The Tartar Cuisine “a cruel comic romp ends as a surprisingly winning story of hardship and resilience” ( The New Yorker).
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