14 Quotes by Alina Bronsky

Sometimes I do readings and people can’t stop laughing, but I’m reading about pretty tragic things. I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course, Russians. It’s despair – just keep laughing, until you are dead.

If at my age i still spent time wondering about people I’d never manage to get around to so much as brushing my teeth.

I had tried to teach her that nobody should be able to see when you were scared. That nobody should be able to tell when you were uncertain. That you shouldn’t show it when you loved someone. And that you smiled with particular affection at someone you hated.

Communism, my dear,” I said when I managed to get hold of a bunch of bananas for hers and let them ripen on the windowsill, given her just one each day so they’d last for a while.

I read how Aminat had grown up in a Soviet ghetto without a father, just her mother’s ever-changing men. How she had starved and had been beaten for being such a disobedient child. How finally she had been sold to a German pedophile by her grandmother in exchange for him marrying her mother, and how she landed in Germany as a result. I read and read, but there was nothing about me. Typical.