Street Without A Name: Childhood And Other Misadventures In Bulgaria

This is the book i can recommend as an enlightening introduction to Bulgaria, and quite he best travel/memoir i have read for a long time.The book works on many levels -as a memoir of her life, as a historical document and as a series of stories of people in her family or just people she meets during her return to the country. These stories reflect the state of ordinary citizens under communism and how the shadow cast by those years darkens their existence today.It is beautifully written with a fine sensitivity for the people she grew up with and those still struggling to make themselves a live.A grim but fascinating read.

An extraordinary and often highly poetic and personal memoir of growing up in socialist Bulgaria (born 1973) in the 1970s and 80s, experiencing the wrenching post-socialist implosion and transformation after Nov. 1989, Kapka's emigration abroad in 1992, and a chronicle of striking vignettes crafted from her several returns to Bulgaria, and 'misadventures' on the winding road, from the late 1990s down to 2007 (Bulgaria's year of once hopeful entry into the EU).In its first 35%, the book sketches a highly negative picture of living in council housing (Youth 3) in Sofia in the late 70s and 80s, and growing up under a socialism that was in Sofia often a "neighborhood under construction", a world of low-cost housing for working families like Kapka's own. Unfortunately, Kapka's entire recounting of her childhood and early teens projects a dark travesty of the social, economic and political realities in Bulgaria at the time, which she often captures through an ironic (even sardonic) prism. It is important to note that Kapka was just 16 when socialism imploded, and she grew up in a nuclear family itself quite alienated from socialist values, one of the first to emigrate after the collapse of socialism. Her memories are also very much about growing up specifically in socialist Sofia and its new (often still muddy) public housing estates at that time -- and not in some smaller Bulgarian city where life was often far less stressful (like Balchik, of which Kapka has fond wistful memories).Writing from eastern Bulgaria, I know that many Bulgarians of Kapka's generation, the last to reach their mid-teens under socialism -- and especially those born 1970 and before -- would disagree strongly with her deeply skewed picture of what living under socialism was. What the excellent Bulgarian schools were like, the youth movements she participated in, and much more. The guaranteed full employment, cost-free high quality medical care, high quality of many food items, almost 'demonetized' public transport and utilities, and a moral economy of general equality.Kapka bemoans the lack of Western styles of consumerism and its umpteen brands of products in the Bulgaria she grew up in. But that socialist system was in some essential ways intentionally 'de-consumerized', offering necessary daily products, like one excellent brand of yoghurt, low-cost, same price everywhere in the country. Or once superb lukanka salami or Bulgarian feta cheese, now available in numerous adulterated imitations, what Bulgarians derisively dub 'men-teh,' bogus. Bulgaria was a society without adverts well down into the 1980s, because none were needed. The Ordinary Biscuits Kapka ironizes (pp. 15, 101, 132) were very high quality, and cost but a few cents. Kapka says there were "no raisins in Bulgaria, only grapes" (p. 79). That is simply mistaken, raisins were of course common in a country with vineyards galore. She also says she never saw a banana in Sofia [!] until age nine on a trip to Yugoslavia, really hard to believe. All Bulgarians I've interviewed certainly ate bananas as young kids and teens in the 1970s/80s when in season.Criticizing the lack of Western consumerism ("it was the shops that had neither taste nor money, just like the State that owned them and kept them half-empty", p. 68), Kapka notes that her mother "became, early on, an expert tailor. She made most of our clothes, and her own". The fact is that the socialist economy strongly encouraged custom-made tailoring. Many Bulgarians bought cloth and then took this to a favorite tailor (either employed at one of the 'fashion houses' operated by the state, or a tailor working at home), for custom-tailored outfits. Such low-cost, hi-quality tailoring is still very common in Thailand, Pakistan, India and elsewhere. And was once in London, Chicago and New York. Today tailors in Bulgaria are hard to find, and many Bulgarians buy their clothing cheap poor-quality ready-made. Or more often 'second-hand': innumerable shops selling 'charity' clothing from the states and Western Europe have sprouted up since 1995 across the land. When Kapka was growing up, virtually no one in Bulgaria would have ever considered buying used clothing once worn by total strangers. In the unending crisis today, that is common.After describing her childhood and early youth, the remaining 65% of the book (pp. 122-335) deals with Kapka's experiences (first in a year abroad in Colchester/UK in 1990), and then as a visiting emigrant observer during several returns to Bulgaria and travel through the country, rich with cameos of people and place. Many diverse voices can be heard in her descriptions of strangers encountered, a whole range of towns, and her remaining relatives. Including some she meets who think the socialist experiment in Bulgaria had many achievements, now lost forever. She gives a memorable picture of the myriad problems average Bulgarians face down to today, sketched with several octaves of empathy and recurrent irony. And Kapka repeatedly returns to reflection on a basic personal conundrum: what is the identity of an emigrant, from Bulgaria, from anywhere -- returning to her native country and all its contradictions?Kapka's dominant chord is to paint Bulgaria in a mixture of dark hues, especially anything connected with the socialist era, "the 45-year-long theatre of the absurd that had been our lives" (p. 121), and what she memorably calls at one point "the freefall of post-Communism" (p. 317). More than two decades after the end of the Cold War, there is a clear market in the West for books (memoirs and others) that demonize East European socialism as an alternative to the neoliberal free market. Yet some would argue that socialism in its distinctive Bulgarian form may have been far more successful than in Romania, the Soviet Union, Poland and Hungary. Certainly many many Bulgarians today look back to what they believe was a far better system for ordinary working people, whatever its multiple failings under the impress of the Cold War. This is more than mere nostalgia.That sentiment has erupted to the surface very clearly in the Feb.-March 2013 upsurge against the Bulgarian government. Ordinary Bulgarians are, as I write, out en masse in the angry streets, protesting the System of the last 23 years: the now exorbitant cost of electricity and steam heat, the deep and worsening mass poverty (goo.gl/MJB63), rising joblessness (in some cities 25%, among the ethnic Roma underclass even 85% without work and on welfare). Protesting their starvation salaries and often miniscule pensions in the midst of the unending post-socialist 'transition' (goo.gl/L9wBM ). A System that has systematically trampled human dignity and hope. Creating in the process a brutally unequal society, dominated by Western monopolies, a tiny corporate clique of the nouveax riches, and a now despised political class. This inside the EU. Generating a tidal population exodus (some 20% since 1990). And concomitant brain and talent drain, the greatest such emigration wave anywhere in Europe (of which Kapka is an eloquent part). Sadly, 'demokratsiya' has become for many a virtual epithet, synonymous with chaos, corruption and desperation (goo.gl/YeQH3). Kapka manages to capture some of that pervasive culture of despair in her numerous often evocative vignettes.One of today's stark tragedies is the situation in the Bulgarian educational system, and the massive decline in standards, here a recent damning report (goo.gl/CeRYu ). Kapka revisits her Secondary School 81, described with various vignettes in the earlier sections of the book, in the closing "Epilogue", but does not probe at all what is going on inside among the teachers or pupils (p. 329). She might have. Kapka also pays a visit to the famous now vandalized open-air complex "The Bells" of her childhood (goo.gl/pT2AE), once incorporating 120 bells from around the world and honoring their children, constructed by culture minister Ludmila Zhivkova in 1979: "The intention was to unite all the children of the world -- white, black, yellow, red -- in an assembly of friendship" (p. 50). Looking in sorrow at the now ravaged complex, many bells "wrenched from the concrete wall and sold as scrap", Kapka laments: "This is the graveyard of Socialism's best dream" (p. 330).Whatever Kapka's politics, a reader will appreciate her keen insight into human character, her deftly ironic style, her superbly crafted cameos, her native humor and often quite distinctive lyrical flair in description. She is after all also a talented published poet writing in English (GEOGRAPHY FOR THE LOST, 2007). It's regrettable that the overall impression of Bulgaria -- then & now -- many may well draw from this memoir'd look back in love and anger is pervasively depressing. Nonetheless, much can be learned from the book about Bulgarian history, and the grit of its people in the face of the hardships that have shaped the ancient/young nation. Valuable is her 2008 interview live: goo.gl/HJh6lReading her book should be combined with Miroslav Penkov's superb volume of short fiction EAST OF THE WEST: A COUNTRY IN STORIES (2011), which provides in eight masterful short tales a somewhat different perspective on Bulgaria & Bulgarians over several decades, including those now caught up in the trauma of emigration, like Penkov himself, in the U.S., or survival here at home. A more academic recent study Kapka may now know and worth reading is anthropologist Gerald W. Creed's MASQUERADE AND POSTSOCIALISM: RITUAL AND CULTURAL DISPOSSESSION IN BULGARIA (2011), exploring somewhat different pathways in post-socialist studies focused on Bulgaria.

A must-read for anyone interested in Bulgaria, Street Without A Name tracks theemotional and physical journies experienced by the author as she revisits the land of her birth soon after its entry to the European Union.Glimpses into her childhood and teens years under communist rule are written withpassion but never sentimentality against a backdrop of cuttingly outlined history. We see both the big picture and the small one: a forced exodus described by the government as a holiday at the time; detailed visits to loved grandparents repeated at intervals until death intervenes.For me, the book has a particular fascination as some of the descriptions of how people lived 'back then', could almost have been written today. Communism ended in 1989; Bulgaria entered the EU in 2007 but in some respects, only the store front has changed.Kapka Kassabova's Street Without A Name is a roller coaster of a read, a true tour de force and a history lesson all in one.

A have a lot of common themes in my life with the author of the book but I am older, so a bit further down the road. My road started in the Soviet Union, right in the heart of that failed system, and after 13 years in the West it brought me to Bulgaria, which I am now enjoying very much. This book is very well written, a little bit naive and generally is a very enjoyable read that added yet another dimension to my life’s experiences.

erm, it's okay. I do like Kassabova's voice and her narrative and poetry is usually worth reading, but this one balances between being extremely interesting and extremely self-indulging. I brought up in Poland at the end of communist era, so many references she makes are very familiar and I guess will be of interest for a western reader. Many stories, unfortunately, are a bit too wordy, and my conclusion was - sadly - Kapka Kassabova, as so many of us, is not that interesting person to write loosely based memoirs. Her fiction, on the other hand, IS great.

I recommend this to anyone interested in Eastern Europe in the 20th century.

The book is wonderfully written, for which it got the four stars. It is a rather grim narrative of growing up in Bulgaria in the last years before the collapse of communism. A long-term émigré myself, I was a bit disappointed by the stereotypical characters and anti-utopian cityscapes (rough Gastarbeiters, semi-robotic bureaucrats and ugly cement high-rise apartments). The author states in the beginning that the story is highly personal and as such not reliable. This taken into account, I still find the book a bit one-dimensional. A good book in my view is like a well-balanced wine - just the right mix of acidity, tannins, sweetness and intoxication. The bitter, hateful and regretful tone of the book seems difficult to grasp as she never suffered persecution. What she endured is merely inconvenience on the grand scale of things.