Moscow is not my Mecca

by Jan Carew

In Moscow is not my Mecca Joseph tells the story of the realities in found in Moscow against the background of illusions he harboured before his arrival. He spends a year at Cheremusky, the suburban preparatory school where foreign students are rushed through an educational assembly line before going on to the Patrice Lumumba University, the Moscow State or to universities in Odessa, Leningrad or Kiev. The superb and effective system of teaching the Russian language to foreign students , equips Joseph, halfway through his First Year to talk to a wide variety of Russians, to visit their homes, to pick up girls and to become involved in a situation that is complex and fantastic. He meets, through a Somali student, a Negro who has lived in Russia for thirty years, he and a young teacher at the university fall in love and she is banished to the "Virgin Lands", he has to fight against racial discrimination and a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and as his knowledge of Russian improves he becomes more and more aware that underneath the new freedom which the Russian people won after Stalin's death, there are phantoms from the days of terror haunting the older generation, whilst the young people hardly know about this.

Joseph's story is important since he is one of the thousand students - Arabs, Asians, Africans, Latin Americans - who are, in fact, the first foreigners in any significant numbers whom the Russian people have had in their midst since the revolution. And being British Guianese and coloured, Joseph looks at Russia with a new eye and gives us insights as original as those of Marco Polo when he went to Cathay.

198 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1964