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All the Clean Ones Are Married:
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About the BookIn 1991, Lori Cidylo shocked her Ukrainian Polish-born parents when she told them she was leaving her reporter's job on an upstate New York newspaper to live and work in the rapidly dissolving Soviet Union. For six years she lived on a shoe-string budget in Moscow, in tiny, run-down apartments, struggling with broken toilets and indifferent landlords and coping with the daily calamities of life in Russia. Fluent in Russian, she rode on public transportation, did her own shopping and cooking, and shared the typical Muscovite's life––unlike most Westerners who were still sequestered in the heavily guarded compounds reserved for diplomats and journalists. As the country experienced its most dramatic transformation since the Bolshevik Revolution, she realized she had stepped into a fantastical and absurd adventure. Cidylo's wry, insightful account of what it is like for an American woman living in Russia is a dramatic tale full of insouciant laughter, in which the immediate sense of vivid experience shines on every page. With the sharp eye of an acute observer, she captures the momentous events no less than the everyday trivia: how do Russians address one another now that the familiar "comrade" is passé; or how do you find your way home in a city where the streets keep getting new names? As Russia even now continues to struggle with the Cold War's aftermath, Cidylo gives a delightful, surprising, warmly human view of post-Soviet life. Reviews"Working as a newspaper reporter in upstate New York in 1991, Cidylo told her Ukrainian-born parents that she wanted to live in Moscow. The Cold War having only just ended, they were appalled. But she persevered, and for the next several years lived and worked in the capital as it quickly sold itself to the highest bidder. Fluent in Russian, Cidylo lived in a Muscovite apartment and immersed herself in the city's everyday life, which she describes with humor and compassion. For example, her efforts first to find a washing machine, then to use it, are poignantly funny. "What did you expect? This is Russia," is the usual refrain of her Russian friends to daily indignities. Many of her anecdotes focus on her experiences of close relationships and gender relations in Russia, which have been much less affected by feminism than in the West though the Russians are enlightened in their own way. (In Russia, Cidylo writes, "what's important is not staying married, but having been married" as a sort of rite of passage.) Her feelings after the untimely death of a male friend and her relationship with a Russian grandmother who works for her as an upholsterer are poignant. Cidylo's light touch and wry humor make this a distinctive trip, offering insight into both sides of the formerly bipolar world."––Publishers Weekly "A beguiling memoir . . . [Cidylo] serves up amusing slices of Soviet life. . . [E]vocative vignettes of ordinary life."––Kirkus Reviews "Cidylo, a New York newspaper journalist of Ukranian-Polish descent, made a life-changing move to Moscow in 1991. There she worked first as a translator, and, as economic conditions worsened, ended up a stringer for various U.S. newspapers. Despite continual frustration with everyday life in Moscow (her search for a washing machine, for example, takes on the fervor of a quest for the Holy Grail), Cidylo retains her sense of humor and makes every effort to adapt. She aptly sums up a foreigner's perspective when she writes, "Many of us don't realize just how ill prepared for life we are until we arrive in Russia." The title refers to the plight of a young woman in search of a "clean" male, made difficult because, according to Cidylo, Russian men largely ignored personal hygiene in the early Nineties."––Library Journal "Cidylo spent 1991 to 1997 living and working in Moscow, first as an editor and translator for the news agency Tass, then as a freelance journalist. She witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the subsequent horrible inflation and the 1993 coup attempt. But as her title suggests, her account of her six years in post-Soviet Russia is of a more personal nature--her experience of Russian hardship. Her breezy style and sense of humor give the book a sense of the live-and-let-live attitude that most foreigners living in Moscow during those years alternated with their sense of culture shock. One is unsure why Cidylo would put up with six years of "everyday calamities" until the final chapter, which describes the standoff between then-president Yeltsin and his recalcitrant parliament, the ensuing street fighting in Moscow, and the firing upon of the White House (where the upper house of the Russian parliament sits). That's when Cidylo's adrenalin kicks in and we discover what Moscow in the 1990s was like for a freelance journalist."––Booklist About the AuthorLORI CIDYLO is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, Boston Herald, Chicago Tribune, The Economist, and other publications. She lives in New York City. |
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