Mother Doll by Katya Apekina
Posted by d'Ettaquette
Russian in origin, stacked one inside the other, the brightly- painted, wooden Matryoshka dolls carry hidden messages. Their “schmaltzy” bodies may be interpreted as a symbol of fertility, a memory of simple past times, an image of a beloved “babushka,” a grandmother, wearing a brightly colored kerchief on her head. These colorful toys captured the imagination of author Katya Apekina. She intertwined four generations of interdependent women in her new novel, Mother Doll.
It all began with Irina Petrovna. Irina can’t find peace until someone in her family forgives her callous conduct toward her daughter, Vera. The problem is Irina is dead, her spirit stuck somewhere in a community with others in a “cloud of ancestral grief.” Irina yearns to explain why she had to abandon her daughter. But her options to communicate with the living are a bit tricky and limited. Frankly, no one is interested.
Marina, Irina’s granddaughter & a biologist, cares only “how bacteria communicated,” not human beings. A scientist, Marina would never entertain speaking to a ghost. And poor Babushka Vera, Irina’s daughter, whom Irina abandoned to an orphanage during the Russian Revolution in 1917, is, at 94, on the verge of death. But perhaps Zhenia, Irina’s great- granddaughter, a Russian medical translator, might find compassion in her heart to hear Irina’s story, and even forgive her. After all Zhenia is in a bit of a mess herself. She’s pregnant with a child her husband does not want. Irina’s only hope to move beyond her predicament might be to connect with Zhenia.
And that’s why one morning Zhenia Pisetskaya answers a “preposterous” phone call from Paul Zelmont, a medium with psychic abilities. Half asleep Zhenia barely hears Paul’s “insane” reference to her dead great- grandmother who seeks forgiveness for abandoning her daughter Vera during the war-torn Petrograd (now St. Petersburg.)
Through Paul’s intervention, Zhenia hears specific elements of Irina’s story – her life in Russia with her wealthy Jewish family, her father’s death that forced her to live with Aunt Gittle and cousin Hanna, her activism in the Russian Revolution and her tutelage under German teacher Fraulein Agata Brunswieller who taught Irina more about romance than declensions of Russian nouns or conjugations of verbs. Startled by Paul’s knowledge and intimate details about her great-grandmother’s “layers of ancestral trauma,” Zhenia agrees to speak to her directly.
Set against the tumultuous reign of Tsar Nicholas ll, amid the Bolshevik Revolution, Apekina’s novel offers a panorama of mesmerizing history. Factual characters–Rasputin, Lenin–interact with Apekina’s fictional ones in a saga that blurs realism with mysticism in a spellbinding darkly comical, zany novel that speaks of the redemptive power of forgiveness.