My Long Journey Home by Lily Golden

Abstract

1 8 7 R E V I E W S about the respect and responsibility toward community asked of us if we w i s h t o t a k e a s e a t a t t h e t a b l e . L a u r a J . B e a r d Texas Tech University Golden, Lily. My Long Journey Home. Chicago: Third World Press, 2002. 240 pp. Lily Golden’s autobiography, published in 2002, offers fascinating reading to those interested in Russian-American relations, black studies, women’s studies, Jewish studies, postcolonial studies, Soviet and post-Soviet studies, and global English as well as to students of discourse-based studies of genre and identity narratives. The author is by ethnicity half African American (with some Native American ancestors) and half Polish Jewish American. She was born in 1934 acitizen of the United States (although she did not know that until she was in her sixties) in Tashkent, capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan. The book gives an account of her family background and extraordinary career as aSoviet historian and specialist in African Studies, her three marriages, and her second career in her retirement as anAmerican celebrity, author, and teacher. My Long Journey Home is emphatically Golden’s story and not an afterthought or complement to the book published in the United States in 1992 by her Russian-American celebrity-television-personality daughter, Yelena Khanga, entitled Soul to Soul: ABlack Russian American Family 1865-1992. Agreat deal about Golden is remarkable. She is an excellent storyteller; indeed the extraordinary experiences that make up her life are afascinating read. Her mother, aPolish-born ^migr^ in the United States, and her gifted AfricanAmericanfather,hiswife’sseniorbyeighteenyears,movedtoUzbek¬ istan. The author’s paternal grandfather was born aslave in the state of Mis¬ sissippi. On the maternal side, her great-grandfather was arabbi in Poland. Her parents renounced theirAmerican nationalities shortly after their child’s birth and her father died when she was still small. Golden excelled in music, languages, and sports and ended up first as an undergraduate at Moscow State University, then apostgraduate and finally aresearch scholar Moscow’s Institute ofAfrican Studies. Her great love and first husband died shortly after their marriage. Her child was born of her second marriage to Abdulla Hanga, arevolutionary and then politician in Zanzibar who was sub¬ sequently assassinated. She kept company with fascinating people in Russia: famous Afncan Americans in her parents’ circles and prominent individuals such as Yuri Rerich, the son of the maverick Russian artist Nikolai Rerikh, the family of Alexei Tolstoy, and Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter. Her remarkable intellectual and scholarly abilities and her tenacity enabled her to prevail among her mediocre and envious supervisors at work. She traveled extensively in the Soviet Union and decades before the collapse i n 1 8 8 I N T E R T E X T S of the Communist regime she was already well-known abroad as ahistorian, not least because of her fascinating work on the “indigenous” black popula¬ tion of the Soviet Union, the descendents of African slaves in Abkhazia. For all that, she was not able to travel abroad freely until after Gorbachev dis¬ mantled the repressive terror-state. Golden does not gloss over disagreeable facts and her autobiographical authenticates history’s well-known description of grim, corrupt, repressive, and deprived Soviet life. The target audience of the book is Americans with little or no knowledge of Russia and the narrating voice at times seems to move into the realm of the anecdotal and fanciful for the sake of agood story. This in itself would not be infelicitous in an autobiogra¬ phy the ultimate purpose of the genre is the definition of identity and in this regard its difference from fiction is slight. But at times, it becomes impossible for readers to suspend disbelief. The account of an incident dur¬ ing aSoviet package tour of Hungary in the early sixties, while amusing, is so absurd that it makes one question the accuracy of some of the book’s claims. According to the account, the KGB group leader of the author’s group was...