Troika
Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip
Irena Smith’s intricate memoir-in-vignettes traces her Soviet Jewish family’s history during a memorable California road trip.
During an atypically wet California January, Smith, her seventy-seven-year-old mother, and her young adult daughter set out to visit two valley wine towns, Solvang and Pasos Robles. With this three-day road trip as its throughline, the memoir also covers Smith’s grandparents’ wartime experiences, Smith’s immigration from the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and her life in Palo Alto. References to Henry James’s novels about American expatriates and to the Odyssey hint at the timeless appeal of journeying and storytelling in a “web of causality.”
Indeed, the self-aware, circling vignettes consider how generational stories fold into one another. As fragments from the past pair with stories from the road, momentum gathers. The rainy weather inspires caution and determination; the women’s rapport is set to an Edith Piaf playlist. A few ancestors’ anecdotes, handed down and repeated until they became lore, are shared: a grandmother’s lost clothesline comes to represent what people hold onto and what is torn away.
An ostrich farm is among the delightful stops along the way, the sketches of which range from a paragraph to two pages or more long. An eye for everyday images localizes them, as of stolen apples while visiting relatives at a dacha and multiple layers of clothing worn on a flight from Moscow to Vienna. With a keen balance between preserving privacy and disclosing just enough quirkiness to convey their essence, Smith’s family members are often revealed in terms of their favorite idioms or their warm, admonishing advice. All adds up to a kaleidoscopic account of a fun trip that was designed to strengthen her mother-daughter connections.
Troika is an eloquent, heartfelt travel memoir about the distances people cross to support one another.
Reviewed by
Karen Rigby
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
