Ludmila kulakova biography books

Women can do everything, and men can do the rest. I first heard the proverb thirty years ago when I was teaching English as a second language to Soviet Jewish immigrants at a place called NYANA (the New York Association for New Americans).

My female students relished quoting it, and, probably because they always prefaced it with “In Russia we say,” I have remembered it as “Russian women can do everything.”

I remember also that, when I was a child and before I had ever met any Russian person, the thought of a Russian woman brought either of two starkly contrasting images to mind: an ethereally lithe and beautiful young dancer costumed as a swan, or a burly woman of indeterminate age with a weathered face, wearing a babushka and gripping the huge wheel of a tractor.

Whenever I heard the proverb—and despite my knowing that it takes far greater muscle to dance Odette/Odile than to drive a tractor—it was the trac