A review by jeninmotion
Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea by Teffi

4.0

Teffi is funny as hell. One benefit of the audiobook version of this is that Rebecca Crankshaw did voices, so you got a sense of the middle-aged lady humor Teffi was throwing down (she was 46 during the period described in the book) and how very dramatic and hilarious young actresses and theater people are when you're a middle-aged lady writer who is out there to enjoy her fame, her boyfriends, and her comfortable bourgeois life.

What's utterly remarkable about this book, then, is that it's the story of how Teffi, bourgeois liberal writer, endured becoming a refugee during a civil war that also happened during the worst pandemic in recent memory until COVID last year (and Spanish flu was worse in terms of deaths). The absurdity of refugee life - the sheer terror mingled with the sheer boredom in this cosmic joke of a situation - comes to life.