Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea

To be in Russia in 1918 was to be caught in a terrifying whirlwind, even for Teffi, a writer so famous in her day there were Teffi candies and a Teffi perfume. She was known for her poems, plays, newspaper sketches, and stories that were compared to Chekhov's, but this book stands alone: a memoir of her year as a refugee, driven across Russia by fortune, rumor, the whims of clerks and policemen, and the progress of distant armies. Throughout, she keeps her humor and humanism and her razor-sharp powers of observation, as well as a terse sense of tragedy, all of which make this an eye-opening book for our own upside-down times.