Asha Greye's Blog: Asha's Analysis

Last month I read a recently released memoir by an ethnically Armenian woman, born and raised in the former USSR/Russia, detailing her brutal childhood. I am avid reader of memoirs, the sadder and more tragic the better, especially if the author isn't American since I love reading about other cultures. However "Mother At Seven" is most disturbing misery memoir I have ever read to date and I was very tempted to brand the author as a liar, but the torture she details is so brutal and cruel that you feel no sane person could ever dream up such tales. A little girl beaten on a near daily basis, deprived of food&other necessities, and treated like a lackey whose only purpose is to serve? Those are things I have read about so many times that I do not even bat an eye at them anymore. What shook to me to my core was how her main abuser,some acquaintance of her parents, not only relished in beating her senseless with various objects, but he also took sadistic pleasure in dreaming up unspeakable tortures that permanently mutilated her body! I know that Russia is a very different place from the United States, a world away, but you could not convince me that even a resilient Russian born child endured all of this torture in silence for a decade and lived to tell the tale with their sanity intact. The author says her memoir teaches that "by fighting through hardship and pain, miracles can still happen, and that life can still be amazing as long as hope is never lost. " Yet a story such as hers' leaves no room for hope. It is beyond tragic, completely hopeless actually, unforgivable, and no miracle could ever rescue and heal a person from the depraved Hell that was life under the tyranny of the demented lunatic who dominated her childhood.