The newest and poorest member of the European Union, Bulgaria still lurks in the shadow cast by half a century behind the Iron Curtain. Westerners might recall the poisoned-umbrella murder, some champion weightlifters and something to do with yogurt, but Bulgaria is, as the author of Street Without a Name puts it, “a country without a face”. Kapka Kassabova grew up in Sofia until the Berlin Wall fell and Communism crumbled. In 1990, aged seventeen, she emigrated with her family, lived in New Zealand, Britain, France and Germany, learned English and became a prizewinning writer of novels, poetry and travel books. Sixteen years later, having shed her past and settled in Edinburgh, she sees herself as a “global soul”. However, she admits that “everybody needs a ‘we’ from time to time”, and it is this impulse to unearth her roots and to reveal her country’s face that takes her back to Bulgaria. The result is an emotionally dark, ironically humorous memoir; the tragicomedy of childhood in Sofia, and a re-examination of a troubled land by an international travel writer, who has plenty of axes to grind.

The daughters of two intellectuals, Kapka and her younger sister were part of the last generation to be brought up in the full blast of propaganda and the through-the-looking glass logic of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. Their childhood home was a two-room flat in a cluster of thousands of eight-floor concrete buildings, “purposeful and sturdy like nuclear plants in freshly bulldozed fields of mud”: Block 328 in Youth 3, on a street which had no name. Cockroaches climbed the walls, barrels of pickled cabbage sat on the balconies, and you knew when the neighbours had diarrhoea. “Mum, why is everything so ugly?”, asked the young Kapka (or Number Sixteen as she was known at school). Education provided the only possibility of emigrating “internally” and Kassabova’s parents pushed her academically, while trying to keep out of the way of the frightening authority figures – “idiots in brown suits”.

The sense of shame and inferiority towards foreigners and “the outside world” was intense. Kassabova describes the sense of wonder when her mother’s cousin brought gifts from Libya: Lux soap, colourful panties, chocolate bars and roll-on deodorants; “like messages in a bottle from the other side of the divide . . . . They seemed coded, sealed inside their smug luxury”. When the author’s mother visited a Dutch university, her despairing amazement led to a kind of nervous collapse. Above all, it was the perfectly clean, perfumed university toilets that did it, and Kassabova puts forward a convincing theory of how public lavatories are “barometers of national self-esteem”. As Bulgarian conveniences were usually filthy holes in the floor, she reasons that the State “wanted its citizens to be publicly smeared with private shame”.

Kassabova’s prose reveals a poet’s sensitivity and has the playfulness of someone relishing a language which is not taken for granted as a mother tongue. But her story is often grim. The fallout from Chernobyl, relatives dying of cancer, her own time in hospital with a mysterious auto-immune disease, her grandfather jumping off the balcony to his death, and the travails of living within a corrupt system are all related with a satirical lightness of touch, which doesn’t disguise the pain. History and politics are woven into Kassabova’s own stories and contemporary encounters, producing a picture of the “Wild East” of post-Communist Bulgaria as a small country that has been bullied for too long. And like so many victims of abuse, it is now the abuser: corruption on an outrageous scale, human trafficking, organized crime, the legacy of harassed minorities such as the Muslim Turks and the Gypsies, and the selling up to unscrupulous foreign developers.

The most memorable and affecting parts of Street Without a Name are those describing Kassabova’s youth; a poignant and painful odyssey into the past by someone who spent years trying to escape it. In this she follows in the tradition of Vesna Goldsworthy’s marvellous Serbian émigré memoir, Chernobyl Strawberries (reviewed in the TLS, April 15, 2005), which also gives a rare and intimate insight into growing up in the Balkans, “on the other side”. “A few weeks alone in the country of your childhood wreaks havoc on your imported adult personality”, confesses Kassabova towards the end of her voyage through space and time, while suffering from “psychic jet lag”. She revisits Youth 3, to find that trees, pizzerias, malls and playgrounds have replaced the dystopian mud. Even her road is now aptly named: Transfiguration Street. “Going home” was the strangest, hardest trip this worldly traveller could make, but in doing so, Kapka Kassabova sheds enough light on Bulgaria to show us some of its many faces.

Kapka Kassabova
STREET WITHOUT A NAME
Childhood and other misadventures in Bulgaria
340pp. Portobello Books. £15.99.
978 1 84627 123 6

Sofka Zinovieff’s biography of her Russian grandmother, Red Princess, was published last year. She is the author of Eurydice Street: A place in Athens, 2004.

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