Jewish American immigrant fiction continued: the contemporary Russian story.
The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories, By Ellen Litman, New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2007Irving Howe's famous observation that the power of Jewish American fiction would wane as the generation shaped by immigration fell silent seems less true than when it appeared in 1977. Since then young writers like Allegra Goodman and Nathan Englander have re-opened the dialogue between Jewishness and modern America, creating a vibrant post-immigration literature. Yet Howe was wrong in a way he could not have foreseen: exciting young writers have recently emerged from among the Jews who emigrated to North America in the waning years of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the post-Soviet era. Critically and popularly acclaimed works such as Gary Shteyngart's novels, The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Absurdistan, and David Bezmozgis's collection of short stories, Natasha, have revitalized the venerable Jewish literary theme of the perils and pleasures of becoming American (or Canadian). Ellen Litman is the latest emigre to tackle this subject in her immensely affecting novel-in-stories.
In a narrative voice closer to Bezmozgis's calm detachment than to Shteyngart's manic satirical flights, Litman portrays Russian Jewish immigrants' experience through a loosely connected series of stories set in Pittsburgh. Much of the book concerns generational conflict: the elderly suffer from the loneliness of dislocation and the loss of respect normally accorded to older people, the middle-aged are suddenly bereft of the good jobs, social networks, and cultural knowledge that hitherto sustained their social standing, and the younger generation is torn between, on the one hand, seeking a safe if dull career, marrying a fellow Russian, and living close to parents and, on the other, leaving Pittsburgh and their own foreignness behind to create what they imagine to be more fulfilling lives.
Immigration is a well-worn theme and a reader might be forgiven for despairing that anything new could be said on the subject. However, the precision of Litman's writing and her savvy choice of narrative structure make the pain and promise of immigrant lives fresh. For example, her portrayal of the loneliness that Liberman, an elderly widower, feels after emigrating is as incisive and poignant as it is beautifully rendered. Kept at arm's length by his married daughter, Liberman develops a relationship with a widow he met on the plane coming to America. A perceived slight leads him into a free-fall of serf-pity that drives the woman away. At the story's end they are reunited at the funeral of an acquaintance, an old woman who never really understood that she had left Russia. When the rented rabbi at the sparsely attended funeral, underwritten by a Jewish charity, calls the deceased by the wrong name,
No one dared to set the man straight. They stood there, shrinking beneath their umbrellas, diminished, every one of them ... It would be just like this, Liberman thought, his own funeral, a drizzly day, a meager group of relatives, some bored onlookers who could make it to the distant cemetery. (54)
As might be expected of a young female writer, Litman is at her best when writing of the two young women who are, in their separate stories, the book's dual center of gravity. Anya and Masha want to break from what they feel are the stultifying limitations of the immigrant circle. Anya, in particular, feels tremendous guilt for this desire for freedom: she realizes that her parents are ashamed that they must depend on her to navigate the new society, cannot support her as they had in Russia, and fear that she may strike out on her own and abandon them emotionally and physically. The pressure threatens to tear the family apart:
My parents are irrational, impossible to be around. There seems to be an angry electric current running through their blood. I understand. I try to be understanding. It's because of the jobs, there are no jobs in Pittsburgh ... Nobody wants a former teacher and an engineer with minimal English skills. They take it out on me and on each other. We don't look like a family anymore. But we have to stick together--there are still appointments, phone calls, and Giant Eagle--all the details of ordinary life for which her parents are suddenly, maddeningly dependent on her.
The stories' relative lack of American (including Jewish American) and non-Jewish Russian characters is striking, and heightens the sense of claustrophobia among the immigrants, making the young women's desire to break free more pointed. When they do appear, American Jews and non-Jewish Russians reinforce the little community's isolation: the American Jews do not understand emigres, and the non-Jewish Russians remind the emigres that they never really belonged to Russia. Masha's first job is as babysitter for the children of a wealthy, condescending American Jewish stay-at-home morn. Walking with the woman and her children one evening, Masha spies her own parents across the street. When her boss figures out who they are.
She waved to them: "Hello, Masha's parents!" My mother smiled gratefully. My father scoffed. It was their turn to be embarrassed. They were dwarfed by their Russian-bought coats and by the absence of jobs, humbled by Pamela's attention. We watched them withdraw into a side street, two comical figures, stepping timidly on the icy sidewalk. "Your parents are cute," said Pamela. (63)
In another story, Masha, now at the university, falls in love with a charismatic young non-Russian visiting professor. Under his influence, she devotes herself to Russian poetry, his specialty, and he, seeing in her a kindred spirit, encourages her. Yet she realizes that ultimately more separates than joins them. When she says that she could not have earned a slot to study philology at Moscow State University because she was a Jew with no connections, "he seemed discomfited by my suggestion. There were topics we never discussed. My Jewishness, for example, He never asked about my parents or why we had come to America. I wanted to tell him. I thought he'd understand ... But he never asked." (96-7) When she later falls from his good graces, he disdainfully accuses her of becoming American, a charge she rejects. Yet she does not feel fully Russian: "He didn't understand. He was a product of our homeland sensitive, foolish, and scornful, full of lavish ideas and puzzling complaints, but unlike me, he had always belonged there." (105)
Litman does not portray the immigrants as forming a tight-knit community. All the characters are connected in some way, through blood, marriage, friendship, or work, but the relationships among them across and even within the stories seem fragile and diffuse rather than solid and intimate. The linked story format contributes to this impression. The stories
represent a movement through time, but they do not follow any individual character's development continuously, from one story to the next. Instead, a character introduced in one story will suddenly reappear in another at a later point in time, without a detailed treatment of what happened to him or her in the interim. (Other characters simply appear once or twice in the book.) These discontinuities also lend the characters a certain opacity, as if, despite the author's artistry, we will never really understand them. I believe that this opacity is deliberate, being as much a consequence of the author's choice of narrative structure as the diffuseness of the characters' relationships.
Despite its overall gloomy picture of immigrant life, the book does have a hopeful arc. The stories move forward through time, as old people die, middle-aged people slowly move up economically or slip into depression and despair, and young people attend college, find work, pair off, and struggle to find their place in America. In the final story, tellingly rifled "Home," Masha returns to Pittsburgh from her new home in Boston to attend her friend Lariska's wedding. At first, Masha sees the marriage as a mistake, a capitulation to the immigrant fear of risk that has led her friend to settle for an uncultured man and a life of hard-won but dull middleclass comfort in immigrant Pittsburgh. Yet she also senses that her own claim to being American, different from Lariska and the rest, is false: "And what if my father guessed the truth? What if there was something faulty in me that made Tom [her American boyfriend] reluctant [to marry her] ? I watched CNN, I ate out, I read American books. I'd quit my job and gone back to school, which was something most Americans admired. But I lacked their boldness and fluency, their flippant resistance to gloom. My father said I'd never be quite like them." (229)
A typical Russian wedding, it is "confusing and disorganized," and brings us full circle as the author gathers all the characters together for the event, briefly and effortlessly filling us in on their doings since their earlier appearances in the book. As the bride and groom take their first dance as a married couple, Masha muses:
They were trying. And maybe not everything was a mistake. Maybe we had learned something, and next time we'd do a little better, if only we gave it a chance. Lariska and Zhenechka were dancing. Under the shining chandelier. In small, shuffling steps. Forever and ever. In sickness and in health. Mismatched like the rest of us. More beautiful than anything. And I had no words to describe them. (234)
In this short, concluding paragraph, Litman brilliantly evokes and embraces life's messiness. Masha may not have had the words, but it is our good fortunate that Litman did.
JOEL STREICKER lives in San Francisco. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Moment, Judaism, and Cultural Anthropology. He last appeared in Midstream in the September/October 2008 issue with a review of Preliminaries, by S. Yizhar.
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| Author: | Streicker, Joel |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Midstream |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2009 |
| Words: | 1619 |
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