I was leafing through my roommate’s Glamour whilst sitting on the pot the other day, and came across an article, in which some loser purchases a Ukrainian bride and doesn’t beat her. ‘I didn’t want a submissive woman,’ the dude defensively claims multiple times — just one 23 years his junior, vastly more attractive than him, and entirely economically dependent. This is presented as a great love story by the bought bride in question (who wrote the article), although Glamour does include a sidebar in which it admits that the vast majority of boughten brides are thoroughly beaten, raped, exploited and usually trafficked, rather than simply having to sleep with an ugly, old, socially inept dude once or twice a month in exchange for citizenship and keep. You might think that a women’s magazine would focus on the main problem of trafficked women, rather than highlight the rare happy exception, but perhaps that’s expecting too much from a fashion magazine.
Anyway, Petropolis by Anya Ulinich is about Sasha, a young woman who comes of age in the impoverished Asbestos 2 district of Russia. Her father booked it to America long ago, and her mother, stubbornly clinging to her status as a member of the intelligentsia even as post-Soviet Russia disintegrates around her, is determined Sasha become a successful artist. Art is the one area in which Sasha shows much interest and some small capability, but unfortunately, before she can do much with it, she gets pregnant at age 15. Her mother insists the newborn baby remain with her in Asbestos 2 while Sasha attends art school in Moscow, but Sasha is devastated by the separation from her daughter.
Impulsively, Sasha enrolls in a mail-order bride service and immediately decamps to Arizona with the vague idea of sending for her daughter. When her new husband turns out to be less financially capable than she’d hoped, she runs away, and begins an odyssey across America in search of her father that leads her much farther astray than she expected.
Petropolis is a charming book with a unique, believable and sympathetic heroine. Chubby, Jewish, biracial and Russian, Sasha fits in exactly nowhere, but then, no one she meets seems much more comfortable in their own skin than she is. From a young age, Sasha is forced to know herself and her priorities very well, so that, no matter how wild and unplanned her journey, she proceeds with sturdy fortitude and level head. An impoverished mail-order bride from a blighted town in middle-of-nowhere Russia, Sasha is the very definition of needy. But while she spends the entire book looking for aid, in the end, she doesn’t really end up finding (or needing) it. Ironically, it is Sasha herself who proves best able to help those she applies to, proving that impoverishment comes in all stripes and everyone everywhere – from Asbestos 2 to Brooklyn – gets a share.
