This is an amazing anthology! Chockful of short stories. poems, and non-fiction, this gave me a sense of what it must have been like to live in the boundaries of the former USSR and Eastern Bloc as that whole entity was coming to an end. As a student of history, I already was familiar with many of the facts of that time, but this anthology painted a much richer, more textured picture of the fall of the Iron Curtain. Kudos to Words Without Borders for assembling this remarkable collection. ( )

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain is an anthology of fiction, essays, poetry, and historic documents published by Words Without Borders. Most of the pieces are short stories, some by world-famous authors like Milan Kundera, some by authors known only in Eastern Europe.

It is dense and, because the pieces are written by behind-the-Iron-Curtain authors, there are insider references and imagery that take a while to figure out. But the overall picture built up through little details and different perspectives is fascinating.

This is a book that will stick with the reader. ( )

In the introduction to this collection, Keith Gessen writes “This is a fascinating and useful book.”

That, if anything, is an understatement.

This book provides an in-depth look, more so than any textbook or documentary can, at life within that mysterious (former) Eastern bloc. This collection of words and pictures, poetry and prose, fact and fiction, explores the Soviet era from the dawn of the Cold War to those fateful days in 1989 when it all came undone to the aftereffects of East meeting West.

From ideas of escape to the West, the absurdity of bureaucracy, and extremes of Soviet censorship to tales of people who proudly stood in queue for hours on end, who wanted to see what was on the other side of the fence, who wanted to eke out a living better than anyone else, to be somebody in a land where all were (supposedly) equal, to find love, and (my personal favorites) true stories of a band that started a revolution, the unexpected suffering of post-Communism Yugoslavia, and the struggle between Eastern desire for all things Western and Western guilt at altering, perhaps destroying, all culture Eastern, this book may, in fact, have it all.

The preceding may have been all for naught, however; The Wall in My Head is a magnificent collection that, despite my best efforts, I truly believe to be indescribable. Perhaps the greatest service I can do it now is to simply leave you with what might be its most profound thought, found in the final sentence of Mr. Gessen’s introduction: “The wall, you know, wasn’t entirely inside your head.” ( )

My German mother had the misfortune to be an adolescent in a village south of Frankfurt during World War II. When the boundary between East and West Germany was drawn, her village lost its train station and she lost half of her extended family; they had become East German by virtue of geography, not personal politics. My father would chime in about how the Berlin Wall separated East and West Berlin and how after World War II the city and country had been divided up like a pie—with the United States and the Soviets getting the biggest slices. In my child’s mind, I took that wall in Berlin and extended it down through the whole country, even going so far as to picture the farmhouse where my mother lived as a child as backing up against a cement wall. As I grew older, I extended that wall in my mind to join up with an Iron Curtain that locked out the even larger landmass of Eastern Europe and Russia. Perhaps these are the reasons why I leapt at the chance to read The Wall in My Head, a new anthology of writing and images from the Eastern Bloc.

For the rest of this review see the winter 2009 edition of The Quarterly Conversation
http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-wall-in-my-head-words-and-images-from-the-f... ( )