The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia -- Ludmilla Pet

<b>Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography <p/>The prizewinning memoir of one of the world's great writers, about coming of age <b>as an enemy of the people </b>and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia</b> <p/> Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel--the setting of the <i>New York Times </i>bestselling novel <i>A Gentleman in Moscow </i>by Amor Towles--Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In <i>The Girl from the Metropol Hotel</i>, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation--of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing--of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food--we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged. <p/>"From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It belongs] alongside the classic st