Bazar-Vokzal

Sadness and laughter, despair and faith alternate in the novels, novellas, and stories of Masha Traub. Her vivid debut came in 2007 with a piercingly honest novel, “Gather Up, We’re Leaving.” Since then, many books have followed—some so funny they bring you to tears, others truly bitter. Two of them, “The Diary of a First-Grade Mom” and “The Little House in the South,” were adapted into feature films.

In her new book “Bazar-Vokzal,” Masha Traub carefully assembles a mosaic of memory from smells and flavors: a European market and the dusty “bazar-vokzal” in an Ossetian village. This is a bright, nostalgic kind of prose about how food, aromas, and chance encounters turn into simple formulas of human happiness.

“‘This book was written just as easily as if, by habit, I were putting soup on to cook for lunch. “‘The bazar,” as it was called in my village childhood, or “‘the market,” as people said in the cities—this is my favorite place and my favorite topic. Scents, flavors, conversations, passing acquaintances—during the time it takes to choose meat or tomatoes, whole lives and ready-made plotlines for a big movie flash before your eyes. Here there are their own rituals, their own rules, their own special language. A random purchase can turn into friendship for many years, or simply give you a good mood for the whole day. And the station—that very one from childhood, attached to the market—is my warmest memories, ones I can’t and don’t want to give up. That’s what a “bazar-vokzal” is like.’”