All the Clean Ones Are Married: And Other Everyday Calamities

In 1991, Lori Cidylo shocked her Ukrainian Polish-born parents when she told them she was leaving her reporter's job on an upstate New York newspaper to live and work in the rapidly dissolving Soviet Union.

For six years she lived on a shoe-string budget in Moscow, in tiny, run-down apartments, struggling with broken toilets and indifferent landlords and coping with the daily calamities of life in Russia. Fluent in Russian, she rode on public transportation, did her own shopping and cooking,...