An insightful memoir delving deeply into the modern Russian immigrant experience. A violent
crime shattered Moscow native Anya Gillinson' s world when she was thirteen years old
urging her family to leave Russia for the American dream. As a teenager raised in a deeply
patriarchal Russian society Anya found herself grappling with a fiercely independent America.
Her candid and heartfelt memoir delves into the clash between these two cultures through the
stories of her family. It explores how her upbringing in Russia and the subsequent immigrant
experience shaped her sense of femininity - a concept with vastly different definitions on
either side of the Atlantic. Dreaming in Russian pits the two competing identities of her
immigrant self against one another. After over thirty years of living in America in the grip
of its indefatigable modernism Gillinson has come to understand that her bones brains and
womanhood remain deeply rooted in the soil of Russian patriarchy. Anya' s journey forces
questions yet in the end it leaves her without answers but at least with a personal
resolution - that three decades of living in America have brought her back to her Russian past
which forever predetermined her present and outlined her future.
