Motherland
by Yaa Gyasi
Mentioned once across 1 show · first heard Jun 2026 on The Ezra Klein Show.
The general take
Gary Shteyngart found Motherland genuinely enlightening, praising it as a National Book Awards finalist that helped him understand his own Soviet background by exploring how the Soviet Union's progressive facade masked terrible treatment of women. He appreciated Julia Joffi's examination of this contradiction, particularly as a fellow Moscow-born Soviet émigré.
About
Acclaimed journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy. In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values? In Motherland , Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women.
Who said what
Gary Shteyngart👍 Recommends
…book recommendations from author's students and mentors
“And the third book is Julia Joffi's Motherland, which was a National Book Awards finalist. An old friend of mine, also Soviet-born, Moscow to my Leningrad. And it's a book about what the Soviet Union was ostensibly this feminist, progressive society. But guess what? It treated women like shit. This book really helped me understand a lot of my own background.”
The Ezra Klein Show — I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novelat 32:43
Listener reviews
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