The release of Portland author Sophia Shalmiyev’s debut memoir, Mother Winter, comes at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment is teetering on the edge of hysteria, funding for birth control and access to abortion is precariously positioned, and eyes are looking to Russia, a looming question mark in our current political saga. Distinctly feminist and speaking to the experience of an Azerbaijani-Russian immigrant, Mother Winter could not come at a better time.
Shalmiyev weaves an interlocking bricolage of abandonment, transnational identity, feminism as salvation, and the many mothers who shape our psyches—at the center of which is her biological mother, Elena, a figure of loss and unresolved longing. Elena is a woman haunted by alcoholism and instability and Shalmiyev, as a child and political refugee, is forced to leave her behind in Russia.