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Book of the Week by Library Director Ophelia Georgiev Roop

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Featured every Sunday in the
Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN
May 8, 2005 Issue

Mother
by Maxim Gorky
c/1907, numerous editions and translations

Remembering Working Poor Mothers
Another Mother's Day! I personally don't think that this one Sunday in May comes even close to honoring mothers adequately or genuinely. I view it as one more opportunity for the advertising propaganda to manipulate us into thinking that on Mother's Day all mothers luxuriate in bed and receive treasured gifts. Perhaps some middle class mothers have that kind of Mother's Day, but for the mothers comprising a part of the working poor, Mother's Day is frequently another day of drudgery.

We live in a state of amnesia and have forgotten that it was not that long ago when mothers worked 12-hour days, had no health insurance or other benefits, suffered injuries on the job and were not given time off work to give birth and well, to be mothers. In fact, we American mothers consider ourselves lucky if we can get a two-month maternal leave without pay without jeopardizing or sacrificing our jobs and our positions to motherhood.

While other Western democracies have had 2-3 year paid maternal leave after childbirth since the end of World War II, we in the U.S. pay only lip service to motherhood and refuse to face the more crucial issues. The French believe that motherhood is equivalent to military duty and that women serve their country by having children in the same way men serve their country by serving in the armed forces. But here in the U.S. women are frequently forced to make a choice between motherhood and work, with disregard to the fact that the majority of mothers work because it is a financial necessity. The advances made by the labor movement do not seem to apply to the working poor comprised mostly of women, hence the term "the feminization of poverty."

All these musings put me in mind of Maxim Gorky's famed book "Mother" available in the U.S. in numerous translations (from the Russian) and editions. In this book Gorky - the writer of the proletariat and the founder of socialist realism - captures the ethos of the working poor in czarist Russia at the turn of the twentieth century.

Gorky means "the bitter one." The author took this pseudonym to reflect his life's story. He was born in extreme poverty. As a child he was often hungry and beaten by employers. He wrote about the social injustices he himself had experienced with uncommon compassion.

"Mother" is the story of a poor, overworked woman who undergoes consciousness awakening and becomes a socialist when her son is imprisoned for his revolutionary activities.

The mother lives with her husband and son in the soot-covered settlement situated in the shadow of the factory where its inhabitants are employed. The factory sucks their strength, their health, their ability to think.

"The weariness accumulated through the years dulled their appetites," writes Gorky, "so they whetted them with drink...and some unaccountable irritation rankled in their breasts, demanding an outlet."

That outlet is to get drunk and beat mercilessly their wives and children, take out their frustrations on the weakest.

Mikhail Vlassov, the mother's husband, epitomizes the workingman in that settlement. He beats his wife and child viciously until his untimely death. But son Pavel does not follow in his father's footsteps as expected. Instead he immerses himself in reading. Through books he begins to discover a new world and hope for a better life. But books, any books - from those by Plato and Aristotle to those by Rousseau and Voltaire - are considered subversive in czarist Russia and are forbidden. Through her son and his comrades, the mother's mind and emotions also begin to awaken. The mother picks up the son's cause when he is arrested for opening the workers' minds to ideas of social justice.

"Mother" is not a well-written book. Gorky uses too many clichés, slogans and simplistic logic. But the book's compassion and the mother's love and self-sacrifice can bring tears to the eyes of many a reader.

Maxim Gorky was one of the most respected and influential writers of the Soviet Union. He had great hopes for the Russian Revolution to bring social reform and became highly critical of Lenin when his policies diverged from the promises of the Revolution.

In 1921 Gorky went to Italy to seek cure for the tuberculosis that had been plaguing him his entire life. Under pressure from Stalin (presumably to write Stalin's biography) he returned to the Soviet Union in 1928. He died in 1936 under mysterious circumstances. Years later, Yagoda, Stalin's head of the secret police, would reveal that he had given the order for Gorky to be poisoned. Many people think however, that the order came from Stalin.

Ophelia Georgiev Roop
Library Director
San Bernardino Public Library

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