Hotel Moscow

by Talia Carner

  I also realized that while our children in the United States learned the basics of market economy when setting up their lemonade stands, negotiating allowances, and later working in fast-food chains that taught them customer service, adult Russians were strangers to the simplest market concepts. At a brush-manufacturing plant, for which the state had paid the bills, provided the raw materials, and then “bought” the finished product at a price it had set, the manager now placed the entire sum of utilities and building maintenance into the price tag of the first item to be sold. That first household brush was priced at the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars. Since no one was buying it, the factory was stuck.

  One night, after our group had paid the local tour agent— one of our organizers—for tickets to a ballet performance at the famous Bolshoi Ballet, we were taken to an unadorned building whose sign in Cyrillic script we could not read. My impression of being in the wrong place was sealed when the dancers came on stage. Although they were talented, we were clearly at a ballet school performance. After being pressed, the enterprising tour agent claimed that “it was the same thing,” and acted indignant when we explained that not only she had committed fraud but also jeopardized her business’s future by developing a bad reputation. Bad reputation? The stupid Americans had handed her whatever cash she had asked for! Now confronted, she was unremorseful about raking so much money into her pocket in a single evening. “You wanted ballet, I gave you ballet.”

  In spite of these experiences, there were women who admired what we did, who appreciated our gifts of lipsticks, condoms, and Tylenol in Ziploc bags. There were so many women desperate to provide for their children in a country where the majority of households were run by women because men often drank, beat their wives, and died of alcoholism at the average age of fifty-seven. I had never met as many bridge engineers as I encountered in one day in Moscow or as many female doctors as I met in one day in St. Petersburg. Yet bewildered by the fast-changing society, these highly educated women were isolated by the absence of a give-and-take social contract that could be fully relied on, and now lost after the state-run child care and meager medical services had been pulled from under them, leaving their children hungrier and sicker than ever before.

  These brave women motivated me to accept an invitation by the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), which sent experts to all parts of the world, to return to Russia only six months later. Among other topics, I was assigned to conduct workshops about truth in advertising and ethical business practices and was given a budget for the translation of material to be printed in one hundred copies. Ironically, my Russian coordinator took the money for the translation, but it went up in smoke even before we left JFK Airport in New York City, my material never translated.

  I landed in Moscow in October 1993, two hours after the uprising against President Boris Yeltsin had erupted. While our bus turned away from a bridge where peasants waved pitchforks and sickles, our Russian handlers insisted that we had misunderstood what we saw. As we watched the burning Russian parliament from a conference building’s windows, our handlers pulled us away into windowless classrooms. As we received frantic phone calls from home detailing CNN broadcasts, our handlers called it Western propaganda. As we were subject to curfew, our handlers “forgot” their English to answer why the hotel was surrounded by soldiers. As I told the group that I had heard tanks rolling down our street, our eavesdropping handlers accused me of enticing disobedience and set me loose to be chased by the Russian militia so that my only choice was to escape Russia.

  Even as the country fought for democracy, these English-speaking translators and facilitators, who must have read English literature and magazines, were incapable of releasing their tight-fisted grip on their charges to stop controlling the flow of information—or even of thought—and to permit us to speak freely among ourselves. Moreover, they were not embarrassed by their obvious lies. After a lifetime of bankrupt ideology and empty slogans, insincerity had long become the norm; no one believed anything anyway.

  Russians still harbored the souls of embittered, subjugated people, a dispirited nation that had known no freedom, privacy, or choices. They were unprepared for democracy, freedom of the press, personal choices, market economy, and assumptions about transactions—be they social, economic, cultural, or legal—that shared the common concept of decency, if not rule of law. The regime that bloomed after the fall of communism embraced the same mind-set as its predecessor, using the former K.G.B. under a new cloak, revering bureaucrats-turned-oligarchs, and exploiting brutal tactics to silence criticism and opposition. Not unlike the Israelites wandering in the desert for forty years, Russians needed time to shed the old mentality of the oppressed until the younger generation raised in a much more open world would be prepared to claim what is rightly theirs.

  That younger generation is now taking to the streets in protest.

  On November 3, 1993, at 2:48 P.M., three weeks after escaping Russia, Talia Carner started her fiction-writing career.

  Communal Apartments

  “Kommunalaka,” a Czar-era mansion converted into an anthill of communal apartments that allotted one room per family with up to twenty people sharing one bath, one toilet, and one kitchen.

  (Photo by Sergey Kozmin)

  (Photo by Sergey Kozmin)

  (Photo by Sergey Kozmin)

  (Photo by Yevgeny Kondakov)

  Talia Carner Talks with Lucette Lagnado

  Originally from Cairo, Lucette Lagnado and her family left Egypt as refugees when she was a small child, an experience that helped shape and inform her recent memoirs, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit and The Arrogant Years, both published by Ecco/HarperCollins. In 2008, she was the recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature for The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, which has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, French, Hebrew, and Arabic. She is also the coauthor of Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz. Lagnado, a cultural and investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has received numerous awards for her reporting work. She resides with her husband, journalist Douglas Feiden, in Sag Harbor and New York City.

  Here she discusses with author Talia Carner her journey in writing Hotel Moscow:

  LL: I love the name “Talia”—it is so exotic. Can you tell us a little bit about your past, where you are from, and how you came to have that name?

  TC: In Hebrew, “Talia” means “God’s dew,” as in “morning dew.” When I was given the name, it was quite rare in Israel. Today, with its variation “Tali,” it is probably as common as “Jennifer” is here. Since the 1940s, the Sabra (Israeli-born, so named after the prickly pear whose fruit is very sweet) pulled away from Diaspora and biblical names and created children’s names that were descriptive words in the spoken language. My immediate family was secular, dominated by the maternal side, an Ashkenazi family whose ancestor, Rev Zalman Salomon, arrived in the Holy Land back in 1794. His son, Yoel Salomon, along with two other community leaders, built the first synagogue in Jerusalem since the Temple was destroyed almost two thousand years earlier. My family was educated—most of my mother’s siblings had graduate degrees; her first cousin was a Nobel Laureate. My adoptive stepfather, an attorney, was born in Leningrad and arrived in Palestine at age seven. When I visited his birth city in 1993—by then renamed St. Petersburg—he had already passed away, but as I walked the streets, I narrated for him what I was seeing.

  I grew up in Tel-Aviv among many friends who were born to Holocaust-surviving parents. There was a difference between my very Israeli parents and my friends’ parents, who were often a decade older and spoke another language at home. They had survived the degradations and losses of the war, then crawled out of the ashes and created a second family with only one child who often had no grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins. Growing up as the generation after the Holocaust, we were all entrusted with the mission “to remember.” At age ten, I went on a class trip
to a nascent Holocaust museum, where we were shown lampshades made out of Jewish skin, and soap made out of Jewish fat. It stayed with us when we served in the Israel Defense Force, which is the true melting pot of Israeli society. During each war we were aware of the dire consequences of losing.

  LL: How do we get from your exotic background to Moscow and the setting for your new novel?

  TC: Since I have lived it, I don’t see my background as “exotic.” However, I can say that I always sought challenges, starting with my selecting a French high school in Tel-Aviv. It opened my eyes to another culture and, when I was seventeen, to my first trip abroad—one of many to come. In the army, my commander hand-picked his charges to work independently so he could study for law school, which he attended at night. It gave me enormous responsibility for people’s lives, as well as reinforced my strong work ethic. Later on, as a young mother, I landed in Long Island, New York, and soon turned my classes at the State University of New York in Stony Brook into credits for a graduate degree in economics. I had started my career in advertising in Israel after graduating from the Hebrew University, but in the United States I incorporated it with marketing and magazine publishing. When I became the publisher of Savvy Woman magazine, I was the youngest publisher of a major magazine in the United States—and only one out of four women in that capacity at a time when even women’s magazines were run by men.

  By then I had developed an understanding of my own feminist ideas about women’s rights, ideas that had germinated when I was young, but for which I had lacked the vocabulary to express. I soon fused my passion for women’s issues with my career. Among other things, I became a volunteer counselor for the Small Business Administration’s programs for women. That’s how I was recruited for my first “citizen mission” to Russia in May 1993 to teach entrepreneurship to Russian women. I was so taken by the valiant women I met—their no-nonsense, hard work, and stick-to-it-iveness that reminded me of my mother and her generation of Israelis who had established the country—that I readily agreed to travel again in October of the same year. Unfortunately, I landed in Moscow two hours after the uprising of the Russian parliament against President Boris Yeltsin had erupted, and soon I became caught in the mayhem. Now that’s “exotic.”

  LL: Lots of people with ordinary careers fantasize about the novels they will publish some day. How did you actually make the switch?

  TC: I was a storyteller. As early as second grade, I gathered a selected group of girls at recess to tell them “my dreams last night.” And although I always wrote well in terms of stringing words into complex sentences or constructing reasonable arguments, I had never fantasized about becoming an author or publishing a novel. Writing had never held the promise of authorial magical dust because I led a busy and exciting life with its own high points. Then, with no preparation or forethought, I just sat down one day—November 3rd, 1993, at 2:48 P.M., three weeks after escaping Moscow—and started writing a novel. I had a story to tell. Russia in Soviet times—and perhaps still now, a mere twenty years later—has been a society of female heads of households with men gone MIA, due mostly to heavy drinking. Besides struggling politically to regain the rights lost when communism fell and the entire legal system was obliterated (including medical care, school lunches for children, and political representation in the parliament), women had to deal with blatant sexual harassment. My fellow Americans and I watched powerlessly as men of authority pounced on the women we counseled. In fact we, too, were pounced upon, literally, by passing strangers. Ads for secretaries required “long legs, no inhibitions.” I wanted to capture this intolerable reality in a novel.

  Within three weeks of writing, I knew that I had found a new calling. I had been running my own marketing consulting firm whose clients were Fortune 500 companies. Now I told my husband that I wished to be “a kept woman,” and since it was December, I declined to accept new clients for the following year. I closed my firm’s satellite offices, canceled four out of my five phone lines, and donated my suits to charity. Prior commitments to clients were executed for the next eighteen months by a skeleton staff while I continued to write feverishly, honing the craft of dialogue, scene building, characterization, and pacing. My last check was from Lincoln Mercury in July 1995. I never looked back.

  In the process of publishing three novels, each dealing with a different social issue in a different setting around our globe, I realized that I think in multilayered plots painted on large canvases. I hold in my head a few perspectives simultaneously, from the psychological state of mind of the players, through the geographical setting, to the historical dynamics. This horizontal thinking underpins my writing while my story moves vertically to ratchet up the tension. Like in a dream, I am in the scene, feeling the emotions, seeing the sights, hearing the lines spoken, and smelling the scents, while the larger story unfolds. I close my eyes, and type along.

  LL: Your book has a wonderfully intriguing title, Hotel Moscow. Can you tell us how that came to be the name of your new work?

  TC: Actually, the working title of the novel was Matryoshka Girl, in line with the naming of my previous three novels. The novel is based upon material researched for my maiden effort mentioned above, a manuscript that was never published, telling the story of Russian women and their lives. Hotel Moscow is a different story, starring Brooke Fielding, a young, urbane, career-oriented Jewish New York liberal who’s been trying to escape the legacy of her parents’ suffering during the Holocaust. I wanted to juxtapose Brooke’s feelings against the reality of unabashed anti-Semitism. Crossing her path with the setting of Moscow during the uprising of the Russian parliament against President Boris Yeltsin—in the confined setting of a hotel—gave me the tool to accomplish that.

  The actual hotel where the story takes place is named Hotel Sputnik. My polls on social media revealed that neither word, “matryoshka” or “sputnik,” was familiar enough. Since I believe in relating my message clearly, I changed the name of the hotel. Hotel Moscow hints at travel and a quest, at a mystery that unravels in a self-contained place, and, of course, at the city in a country that is on the news every day.

  LL: How did you do your research? Did this work require lots of travel?

  TC: In 1994, working on my first manuscript, I interviewed many Russians who had emigrated to the United States not long before and had fresh impressions of the trials and tribulations of living at the bottom of the food chain in a corrupt society. I also interviewed Cold War–era U.S. security personnel and attended lectures about the Russian politics of the time. Personally, while visiting Russia twice in 1993, I watched her women—probably the most educated group of women I had ever met—suffer the humiliation stemming from deprivation: the famous food lines led to empty stores, since basic consumer products had never been manufactured. Soviet Russia had been a superpower that cynically manipulated its people, toyed with their sense of worth, and deprived them of everything they wanted. The women were reduced to being hunters and gatherers almost like the African women I had counseled before them.

  In Moscow and St. Petersburg I had visited small apartments, similar to the one described in Hotel Moscow as Olga’s. But leaving Moscow in October 1993, at the Frankfurt airport, I met two American architects who had been hired by newly rich Russians to renovate old mansions that had been turned into anthills of rooms barely suitable for humans. I saw pictures of families—sometimes even three generations: an aging parent, a young couple, and a baby—squeezed into a 10-by-14-foot space. I learned how typical these communal apartments were both through my subsequent interviews and my continuing involvement with Russian women helped by the Alliance of Russian and American Women—the organization with which I had visited Russia the first time, and which later built a “business incubator” in St. Petersburg. One of our recipients had grown mushrooms under the small table in her room; another had had to remove her sleeping cot just to make room for a sewing machine.

  LL: Did you have to go through many drafts to get to t
his finished product?

  TC: While I had done all the research twenty years earlier, writing Hotel Moscow from scratch was a downtime project while I prepared the release of Jerusalem Maiden with my publisher and then spent two years book touring, giving keynote speeches, chatting with book groups, blogging, and conducting media interviews. Even though I am now a much more experienced novelist, I still edit and revise ad nauseam. It is no exaggeration to say that I reread this version forty times.

  I also faced an interesting challenge: Each of the protagonists in my previous novels was instantaneously sympathetic. In Jerusalem Maiden, for example, the reader immediately feels for a twelve-year-old who is supposed to be married off soon. And there was no problem evoking compassion for the Russian women who were secondary characters in Hotel Moscow. But how do I make the plight of a thirty-eight-year-old successful New Yorker worthy of empathy? How do I set up the story so that the reader will want to get on the journey with her? I knew where I needed to go—into the psyche of a second-generation Holocaust survivor who lived the experiences and the trauma as her own, whose existence to her parents was merely as a stand-in for all the children and relatives who had died. With every round of revision, I struggled with how much of Brooke’s background to lay out and how much to let the reader extrapolate on her own When my editor at HarperCollins told me how lonely Brooke seemed to her, I knew that I had nailed the character.