How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

Drakulić’s focus on women turns back to apartments, this time to kitchens as locations where her friends confide their disappointments and aspirations. Her Hungarian friend Zsuzsa is making beef soup with handmade noodles, because this is what her family likes best. Though Western imported food is more available, the kitchen still retains one essential aspect particular to the region. Only the kitchen is “the place that turns her apartment into a home” (105). Zsuzsa had worked as a translator and found herself settled into a marriage that felt like a state of “deep hibernation,” so she eventually sought a divorce (107). Drakulić argues that this story is so common, “stories that we all know almost by heart” (107). She grieves, because her ex-husband’s life was “more fulfilled than hers,” but she avoids anger because “then her words will turn against men, and this is what she doesn’t want to happen” (107-08).

In another apartment, this time in Poland, Drakulić meets Danuta and Tadeusz, a couple who divorced because the latter’s activities as a dissident made it impossible for him to keep a job. He has found the pro-democracy Solidarity movement a disappointment, but Drakulić emphasizes that Danuta is also a victim as she could not pursue any of her own dreams due to pressures to work. As Danuta recounts her husband leaving her for a younger woman, she does not blame her husband. Drakulić argues that all of the women she interviews wonder if their marriages would have turned out differently “in normal circumstances,” by which they mean a more functional socioeconomic system (109).

She has another version of the same conversation in a kitchen in Prague, where her friend Veronika fears her husband has a mistress. She spends weekends cooking more elaborate meals, as if cooking is a “magic potion” that will solve her family stresses (111). Drakulić argues that she, and her friends, see the society they live in as “a force larger than life, mythological and real at the same time, controlling us, dividing us, eating us up” (111). She claims that this sense of universal “helplessness […] unites us with men” and prevents a sense of examining men “as a category” (111). She claims that in all these kitchens, “what we talk about is identity” (112). 

On a trip to New York city, Drakulić finds herself struggling with a strange impulse: to pick up a muffin discarded on a New York sidewalk and eat it. She stops herself in time, but still finds herself scrutinizing waste in the city, noting that most trash cans are full of food. She forces herself to remember that, “unless I was a beggar myself, I was looking at something called ‘garbage,’ not exactly food, at least, not here” (114). She also finds herself more acutely aware of homelessness than her American friends, an urgency that never passes even as they insist she will adapt to it in time. She is especially disturbed by a Black man on the subway who shouts, “I’m a human being too,” and discovers that giving money does not soothe her conscience (115). At the same time, “the poverty is so vast one just can’t keep one’s eyes shut” (116).

The appearance of this kind of poverty is a new phenomenon in Yugoslavia, partly a product of the rocky economic transition to capitalism. Their appearance of the homeless is disorienting and how to respond is not always clear, as Yugoslavs find themselves “caught between two sets of values, one where beggars are not allowed at all and the other where they are a consequence of capitalism, we simply are not sure how to deal with them” (117). In socialism, to be a beggar is criminalized, a category known as “parasitism” (117), because not working and demanding from others contradicts socialist values.

Back in New York, Drakulić meets a friend from home and both notice that they are more sharply aware of poverty than those around them. Her friend, Evelina, blames this on the idealization of the West from consuming it only through popular culture, where there was “real poverty without a happy ending. We made the mistake of taking them for real” (118). Drakulić finds a more spiritual explanation: She and her friend have a “communist eye. Like a third spiritual eye in the middle of one’s forehead, this one scans only for a certain type of phenomenon, it is selective for injustice” (119). Unlike other aspects of socialism, Drakulić argues that this gaze for how the world is wanting is “something we care to preserve, the idea of justice from the other world we brought with us” (120).

On the other end of the spectrum, the sheer array of consumer choices on display in a store like Bloomingdale’s produces a kind of “fever” that eventually gives way to “powerlessness” (121). The scale is so vast that a department store transforms into a “museum,” rather than a real place. Drakulić argues that the “iron curtain” of having lived in communism, in a society that clung to equality as an ideal and where most citizens were equally poor, will persist inside individuals long after new political systems have been adopted. 

Drakulić recalls her time in America meeting with some feminist scholars, who asked her for her thoughts about women “in Eastern Europe,” reducing countries and cultural contexts and women’s lives to the “system they were living under” (123). Drakulić shocked the conference by demonstrating the status of women in the region by holding a tampon and pad aloft: the failure to provide sanitary napkins as evidence of failure to provide for “half the population” (124). She expresses the persistent frustration bordering amusement of trying to interact with scholars and leftists who do not understand daily life under the regimes they study, and are not truly able to grasp or appreciate the conditions they encounter. She declares, “I love the way they complain when the food is too greasy, there is no hot water in their hotel, they can’t buy Alka-Seltzer or aspirin, and their plane is late” (126).

Her derisive exasperation continues as she reads a letter from a conference attendee, requesting a “critical theory approach” on Yugoslav women’s issues, perhaps touching on “women’s influence in the public discourse” (126-27). Drakulić then asks herself, “what is the way to show her what our life, the life of women and feminists, is like?” (128). She recalls forming a feminist organization as a young woman, not quite sure about the Western feminists she met at a conference, but finding herself labeled an “enemy of the state” for her work (129). Drakulić describes attending a similar meeting in Warsaw a few years later, with women who “don’t know how to organize yet, but they do know that feminism is about prejudices, about women’s self” (129). She makes friends in Poland and Budapest who quietly collect Western feminist texts, and turn to these for validation that their politics have meaning. Drakulić suggests to her Western correspondent that she focus on the growing threat to abortion access, because critical theory is not yet on the horizon. She concludes, “why don’t you try asking us something else?” (132).