Reconfiguring the Categories

Yelena Furman reviews Karolina Krasuska’s “Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction.”

By Yelena FurmanJuly 15, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Literary Criticism

SINCE THE EARLY 2000s, Jewish immigrant writers from the former Soviet Union have been a visible part of the US literary scene. While the endlessly self-promoting Gary Shteyngart may be the most well known, there are many others, including, although certainly not limited to, Lara Vapnyar, Anya Ulinich, Ellen Litman, and Irina Reyn. There are, in fact, more women writers than men in this group, and new names of all genders continue to appear. While there are many individual thematic and stylistic differences among them, fundamental commonalities include a sustained engagement with themes of immigration and hybrid cultural and linguistic identities.

As novels and short story collections continued to appear, so did journal articles, special issues, and conference panels by various scholars. The first and foundational academic monograph was Adrian Wanner’s Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Northwestern University Press, 2011), which discussed Jewish and non-Jewish writers who immigrated to the United States, Germany, Israel, and France. Karolina Krasuska’s new book Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction, which focuses on Soviet Jewish writers in the US, where a majority of such authors reside, is a long-overdue addition to the scholarly field.

Given the hybrid nature of immigrant identities, academics working on such writers—like the writers themselves—have routinely faced the question of terminology. The term “Russian-American” was used by American publishers to market the work of these writers, and several academics adopted it, albeit with copious disclaimers. Jews born in Soviet Russia were never considered Russian, not to mention that several of these writers were born in other parts of the Soviet Union (where they were also never considered part of the local population). “Russian” in this case denoted neither ethnicity nor citizenship but rather language; these writers were Russian speakers. They were also Jewish and, after leaving their birthplaces, were immigrants in the United States. Given the various elements of their identities and no uniform agreement on what to call them, other terms emerged, such as “Russian-Jewish-American writers” and “translingual Russian writers,” underscoring that this multivalent identity overflows the terms of its categorization.

As Krasuska explains in her introduction, her choice to refer to these writers as “Soviet-born” is an attempt to move away from such “identity-based modifiers” and toward an emphasis on migration as the constitutive element of their lives and work. She proposes an approach to this body of literature as one that “introduces new themes that rewrite the legacy of the Cold War from the perspective of migration and the Soviet experience.” (The related claim that the term “Soviet-born” is “more expansive or inclusive than ‘Russian’ and opens up the possibility of different locations of this fiction—not only Moscow and Leningrad but also Riga, Minsk, and Odessa” is a misrepresentation of the way other scholars use “Russian”—i.e., to denote language rather than geographic location.)

Krasuska’s emphasis on migration is enriched by her approach being “based in feminist and queer theory.” Pointing out that such gender inclusion challenges the mostly male canon of Jewish American writing, she refreshingly observes that, while she discusses several works by men, “there is no ‘male chapter’” in the book. One may add gratefully that her approach also challenges the mostly male (read: Shteyngart) face of Soviet-born writing in the United States.

Given the background of these Soviet-born writers, she also reads their texts “Jewishly,” which in their case differs markedly from the idea of Jewishness in the US. The outlawing and persecution of religion in the Soviet Union, coupled with the USSR’s virulent antisemitism, resulted in Soviet Jews fiercely identifying as Jews, while at the same time being highly secular and far from religiously observant. Consequently, Soviet-born writers have different textual priorities, remaining at a “distance […] from the established narrative of Jewish American literature.” Krasuska argues that this distance “allows for the critique and expansion of this category” by “expos[ing] critical differences, which is the aim of this book.” Soviet-Born seeks to interrogate and dismantle key assumptions of Jewish American fiction, as well as scholarship on this fiction—which, along with a straight male bias, largely excludes themes of migration from its purview (although this subject was of course significant to earlier generations of Jewish American writers, themselves immigrants or direct descendants thereof).

The first chapter, “Diasporic Spaces,” explores how Soviet-born fiction reconfigures Jewish American writers’ representations of Eastern Europe. If such writers tend to present Eastern Europe as the land of shtetls and “a past left behind,” Soviet-born writers, having more recent, direct experience with this geography, reconfigure this space as a concrete part of the contemporary world. As Krasuska states, “Soviet-born authors shift from the historical and cultural construct of ‘Eastern Europe’ to the historical and political entity of the (former) Soviet Union.” Moreover, in the age of migration and near-instantaneous communication, Soviet-born authors “challenge the post–Cold War notion of separate ‘worlds’” by presenting the former Soviet Union and the United States in (relatively) close proximity to each other, with characters freely moving between the two. This “geographical mobility” characterizes, for example, Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s 2014 novel Panic in a Suitcase, whose protagonist makes the reverse journey from her immigrant home in Brighton Beach, New York City, to reconnect with her Odessan birthplace, in “a narrative that challenges the primacy of the immigration destination.” Krasuska’s most fascinating analysis in this chapter is about the significance of water imagery in Akhtiorskaya’s novel, since the ethos of both Odessa and Brighton Beach is heavily influenced by being situated on large bodies of water. Not only does this water culture link the American neighborhood with the Ukrainian city in the novel, but Akhtiorskaya also establishes an unexpected affinity with other “coastal peoples,” such as writers from the Caribbean.

“Redefining survival” is the focus of the second chapter, which discusses how Soviet-born texts reconfigure Jewish American narratives of the Holocaust. For Soviet Jews, there was no Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen; there was instead a “Holocaust by bullets,” in which German killing squads, with help from local collaborators, exterminated Jews en masse in ravines like Babi Yar. Those able to escape extermination evacuated to Central Asia under harsh conditions. At the same time, there were Soviet Jewish soldiers fighting in the Red Army. While these Jewish experiences remain relatively unknown in the United States, this is “a story that now enters migrant writing in English” through the work of Soviet-born writers. Krasuska analyzes how “migrant memory […] puts in staggeringly close proximity different modes of survival: in combat, in flight, and in Nazi genocide”; indeed, as she observes, while for American Jews survival refers to the Holocaust, for Soviet Jews it refers to the war as a whole. Among the texts she discusses in this chapter is Boris Fishman’s A Replacement Life (2014), in which the English-fluent protagonist becomes drawn into writing fake Holocaust compensation claims for his Russian-speaking grandfather and his grandfather’s friends in New York. While Fishman approaches his topic with a large dose of (laughter-through-tears) humor, the novel problematizes the established “hierarchy of survival” in the West, according to which only certain wartime experiences are deemed eligible for compensation. The protagonist Slava’s grandfather and his friends may not have gone through the camps, but as Soviet Jews, they have suffered immensely nevertheless, and Fishman’s novel “stretches the term [survivor] to encompass the less obvious, undervalued, and under-narrated suffering within the Soviet system.” Because “Soviet migration generates a different vocabulary to supplement how we theorize surviving World War II and the Holocaust,” Soviet-born writers broaden the Jewish American approach to Holocaust memory and the honoring of its victims and survivors.

The chapter “Afterlives of Communism” shows how texts like Sana Krasikov’s The Patriots (2017) bring to light a subject suppressed by Cold War attitudes in the United States and not addressed by Jewish American literature: American Jews’ early 20th-century leftist politics and their affinity for the fledgling Soviet state. Krasikov’s monumental family saga tells the story of a Jewish American named Florence who moves to Stalin’s Soviet Union to help build the glorious communist future (as well as to follow what turns out to be a short-lived love interest), while her descendants move back and forth between the US and post-Soviet Russia. Delineating the parallels the novel establishes between the two societies, Krasuska argues that, rather than relying on a “demonization” of American leftists, The Patriots depicts a network of “family memory” that links American and post-Soviet spaces and actors and “participates in creating gulag postmemory writing in English.” (That said, while the novel does not demonize the American leftists who went east, it does not celebrate them either. It makes clear that Florence’s decision to move to the Soviet Union has disastrous consequences not only for herself but also for those around her, including her son, and that she is moreover a thoroughly unlikable and morally compromised character.)

“Soviet Intimacy” is the chapter in which Krasuska most directly articulates her arguments about gender and sexuality. In a challenge to the largely male canon of Jewish American fiction, Krasuska explores how Soviet-born women writers address sexuality and the body. Ellen Litman’s 2014 novel Mannequin Girl, whose young female protagonist suffers from scoliosis, documents the state’s attempt to literally regulate the bodies of its citizens, including through policing gender and (Jewish) ethnicity. By contrast, Lara Vapnyar’s The Scent of Pine (2014), whose adult female immigrant protagonist shares with her American lover stories of her youthful Soviet experiences (while trying to solve a mystery from this past in a rather improbable plot), presents intimacy in the Soviet Union as not inextricably linked to oppression. Given the heavy state regulation of sexuality, but also accounting for women’s agency in sexual matters, Krasuska insightfully proposes the concept of “intimate citizenship” as a framework for such discussions since “intimacy itself is broader [than sexuality], encompassing various aspects of gendered embodiment.” Krasuska also discusses Vapnyar’s short story “Lydia’s Grove,” whose young protagonist recounts (without fully understanding) the relationship between her mother and her mother’s female friend, as one of the still rare (but increasing) examples of queer representation in Soviet-born writing.

In the final chapter, “Keyword: Migration,” Krasuska analyzes how Soviet-born “literature of migration” reaches outward beyond its own particularity to establish links (not always successfully) with other migrant groups. One of the texts considered here is Nadia Kalman’s The Cosmopolitans (2010), which, by centering a Russian Jewish immigrant family but also bringing in other migrant characters and their narrative points of view, participates in “queering the genealogy of Soviet Jews.” Such queering of Jewish genealogies, made possible through the perspective of migrants, stands in contrast to what Krasuska views as the “sedimented […] stories of descent” built on a shared ethnicity that are characteristic of Jewish American fiction. Instead, she proposes migration rather than ethnicity as a more inclusive “analytical framework in which to see literary production” in a globalized world. This outward reach informs the book’s conclusion, in which Krasuska calls for “comparative literacy”: dialogue across cultures and boundaries. In this endeavor, as she poignantly notes, critique is not merely “an academic exercise” but has real-life relevance in helping “to reconfigure the categories and terms” about such global issues as migration and gender.

Soviet-Born makes a deeply researched and analytically insightful case for the ways in which Soviet-born writing challenges and adds to Jewish American fiction. Yet this choice to view Soviet-born literature as part of Jewish American fiction immediately engenders a counterargument about the book’s framing. Immigrant writers living in the West and writing in English fairly obviously cannot be considered part of Russian literature, broadly defined. Given how much their coming from the former Soviet Union has shaped their lives and the subject matter of their texts, however, they cannot be slotted straightforwardly into an American mold either. Moreover, given Soviet Jews’ general nonobservance, several of these writers have themselves articulated differences with both American Jews and their literary output, as Krasuska notes. The question of whether hyphenated writers can be said to expand an existing literary category or constitute a distinct one of their own is a never-ending debate. One may disagree with the book’s premise, yet the argument Krasuska builds from it allows for new and original ways of understanding these writers’ works.