It’s the Same Story Everywhere

Sasha Vasilyuk interviews Boris Fishman about his latest novel, “The Unwanted.”

By Sasha VasilyukMay 22, 2025

• Fiction

BORIS FISHMAN CAME INTO my life a decade ago by way of his debut novel, A Replacement Life (2014). He was the second Soviet-born American writer I read (the first being Gary Shteyngart) and, as any author from an ethnic or national minority can tell you, it meant a lot to see my life reflected in fiction. Our immigrant experiences were different: he left what was still the USSR as a child refugee who didn’t know where his family would end up; I moved after the USSR ceased to exist and headed directly to San Francisco, where I live to this day.

Perhaps it is because of this divergence in experience—I never lived with the extreme uncertainty of foreign authorities deciding my future—that the premise of Fishman’s new novel, The Unwanted, intrigued me. There was also an added twist: The Unwanted is about a family of refugees fleeing an unnamed country ravaged by a civil war between a majority and a minority sect. Dina, a willful girl of about nine, watches her parents, Susanna and George, prepare for a dangerous and secretive escape. She doesn’t fully understand all the choices and sacrifices her parents make along the way, but she is eager to set things right in her own daring, albeit sometimes misguided, way. Unlike most accounts of the immigrant experience that focus on assimilation, this novel explores all the other parts of the experience that, in many ways, are often more dramatic: the leaving, the waiting, and the returning.

In early May, I talked to Fishman, who currently teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Austin, about his own experience as a child refugee and his choice to dig into that subject matter through an unusual lens at a time of great world upheaval, including the war in Ukraine.

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SASHA VASILYUK: How has it been living through the last three years of war in Ukraine?

BORIS FISHMAN: They have been very upsetting. I hesitate to say “devastating,” as that should be reserved for the people who are there. But I have been brought very low by it. A couple of times when I involved myself in reporting projects about the war, I became lost to my family. I have an overexpressed sense of injustice, and the injustice involved in the Russian invasion of Ukraine is beyond measure. It has been staggering to see how indifferent much of the world has been to it.

Has the invasion played a role in your writing of The Unwanted?

I actually started writing it in 2021, before the full-scale invasion, but it was fed by a general sense of gathering darkness in the world: the Syrian civil war and the migrant crisis, ISIS, the Taliban’s approaching reconquest of Afghanistan, some work I was doing on the Rwandan genocide. Despite this, the seed for the novel was actually quite light. My friend, the Iranian-born novelist Dina Nayeri, was going back to Italy to see the place where she and her mother stayed as refugees when they fled Iran. These were the same document-processing checkpoints that my family passed through as refugees, and I was reminded of what a hothouse environment that must have been: all these refugees converging on these random two-star hotels in Vienna and Italy, families from Soviet Belarus next to families from Iran. I started thinking of who fell in love, who fought, what were the small and large interpersonal dramas that would have occurred in that environment, where everyone is stateless and undergoing the very large drama of waiting to find out if they will be resettled.

But that novel didn’t want to get written. It didn’t flow. The thing that kept flowing was in this darker vein. While the reasons my family had to flee were not as immediate and violent as for these characters, who are living through a civil war, I wanted to imagine people in situations of extremely unequal standing in their countries, and the impossible choices with which that often leaves them. The terrifying safety of the country in the third part of the novel is modeled on Rwanda today, where ethnicity has essentially been outlawed—and instead, they have a kind of police state that’s economically viable, so everyone wants to do business with them.

I also began writing this novel while living in transitional housing in Missoula, Montana, where I was teaching at the time. It was very uncomfortable. We’d just had our first child, for whom there was no room in this home, so she slept in the laundry room. This home that didn’t even belong to us was our fourth home, in four different cities, over three years. It was a destabilized time. I wanted to capture that general sense of not having a home.

Do you have a place in your life that feels like “home”?

I’m afraid I don’t. I have never felt fully at home in America: it’s too concerned with profit at the expense of morality and community. I like to fantasize that I’d feel at home in Western Europe, an improved version of the Soviet Union where I was born, but by this point, after more than 35 years in the United States, that’s probably not true. It’s the great lack of my life. There have been places that have given me the smell of home, including Northern California because of its natural majesty, and because I do some work in wine. In 2021, I apprenticed for part of the growing season with a natural winemaker in Sonoma. It really binds you to the landscape. Also, Miami Beach, because it’s so beautiful and because it’s filled with immigrants. I’ve gone back to Eastern Europe, but I never felt at home in Russia because, with exceptions, so many Russians are so arrogant. I couldn’t go back to Belarus, where I was born, because it’s a police state. But I felt at home in Ukraine. The people there, the rituals, the community—it all felt like the place I’d grown up.

Can you talk about your decision not to name the country the family in The Unwanted is running from, while, at the same time, inserting some geographical markers such as “Europe” and “America”?

I didn’t want to get bogged down in what had actually happened in Afghanistan or Iran or Syria. Also, I wanted to make the point that it always works the same way when the people in power don’t protect the people without power. They all tell the same lies, they all use the same pretexts to protect their power, they all demonize dissenters in the same way. It’s the same story everywhere, just with different flavorings.

I was also very influenced by Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) by J. M. Coetzee. It takes place at a frontier outpost of an unnamed, fading empire that decides to revive itself by contriving a war with the natives that live outside the perimeter. Nothing stirs the population to action and a sense of cohesion more than a fabricated war with a non-enemy, right? Of course, that book is ultimately very different, because it concerns a clearly invented place whereas my book is more about a masked, real place. But it was very influential.

In the novel, the narrator is omniscient and we see what all three members of the family are thinking. But it is Dina, the child, to whom we return over and over. How does a kid who is dragged along and doesn’t really know what’s happening to them experience immigration differently from an adult?

Dina is a kind of imagining of what my friend Dina Nayeri might have been like at that age. It is a rewinding of the person I know into the kid she might have been. She couldn’t be an avatar of me because I was too obedient as a child. And Dina has this wonderful, impish, mischievous, disobedient Iranian-village-girl side that to me felt essential for this character.

Personally, immigration has left marks I’ll have for the rest of my life. And what’s interesting to me is that so many people immigrate—and so many people emigrate from the former Soviet Union—but it’s not the sort of thing that mediates their lives on a daily basis. They might even be far more connected to ex-Soviet culture than I am, but the influence has not interfered with their American lives to the degree it has mine.

With this novel, I wanted to go back to that origin moment. My sense of myself altered so irrevocably when we immigrated that I almost don’t have any memories from before. Something in me absolutely blocked off that past. I don’t think it’s because there was any trauma in it; if anything, it was quite sheltered and innocent and Eden-like. But what followed was so nerve-racking and confusing that it blotted out anything that came before it. I guess it’s like a scab that you keep picking: I keep thinking about that origin moment when everything changed, perhaps to try to understand how it might have gone differently.

How has being a refugee shaped you—socially, maybe politically?

I think that I have been tremendously shaped not by immigration or the experience of being a refugee but by the two things around it—which is to say, the experience of being the son of Soviet Jews in the Soviet Union, which was an existence of extreme insecurity for them and made them fearful and worried about everything. I took in that constant fearfulness and worry. My wife is American—she comes from comfort and security, and you can just see that her instinct is not to worry that something is going to go wrong. Mine is very different.

The refugee experience itself was destabilizing and worrying but also exciting. All of a sudden, we were in Austria, we were in Italy, we were in Western Europe. We had a stipend. It was like a giant, nervous vacation. But then the vacation ended, and you came to the United States and you saw what life was going to be like, and that money actually did not grow on trees here. And all your predecessors who had reported what it was like had really rosied things up, because they wanted to make it seem like they’d made the right decision. I was the first in the family to learn English, and so I was put in charge of the family and of figuring out all sorts of questions that a nine-year-old probably should not be figuring out. It filled me with a lot of anxiety and dread because I was really worried about not doing a good-enough job. So those years are colored by endless dread. My childhood really cut off sharply at the age of nine.

How does The Unwanted, your third novel, differ for you from your previous work?

I wanted to move away from writing about the Russian-speaking Jews that dominated my first two novels. I felt like I’d said all I had to say about that. This time, I decided to globalize the gaze. This novel is also very different tonally—much more solemn than the occasional humor of the earlier novels. And it’s much sparer than those earlier books.

I see the progression of my books as a movement away from lushness and performative wit to the kind of spareness that feels like a pane of glass, where you experience almost no mediation from the author, and you feel as if you are just there, watching these characters go through these things. By the way, with it now having been published, I reread it, and I see all sorts of places where I couldn’t resist the clever metaphor, the clever simile—you know. If I write another book, I will be working, probably, to remove even those.

You see this progression in a lot of authors where, early on, you want to prove that you’re capable of cleverness and intelligence. But as you get older and have written more, you become much more interested in getting out of the way. Your ego becomes smaller, and you become interested in privileging the story of the people you’re telling, rather than your own spin on it. For me, the goal was to be the clearest pane of glass I could be.

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Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life (2014), which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal, and Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo (2016), both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, as well as Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table (2019), a family memoir told through recipes. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, New York magazine, and many other publications. He has taught at Princeton University and the University of Montana, and now teaches at the University of Austin.

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Featured image: Photo of Boris Fishman © Stephanie Kaltsas.