Summary
p. 179-181
Texte intégral
1The monograph Poradzieckie: Najnowsza żydowska literatura migra cyjna w Stanach Zjednoczonych [Post-soviet: Recent Jewish Literature of Migration in the US] focuses on twenty-first-century literary production by immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the context of American literature and more specifically Jewish American literature. This writing occupies a singular place in the renewal of meaning within Jewish American literature, because it adds a specifically Soviet and post-Soviet cultural inflection to the major thematic axes of English-language Jewish American literature, which leads to a set of cultural displacements. Specifically, the book explores how Eastern Europe functions in this fiction as a space beyond what is distant, different, post-Shoah, as it is quite often the case in other Jewish American literary works. Second, it considers post-Soviet Jewish American writing as ethnic literature in the US and works through how it creates representations of non-immigrant Jewishness and ethnic/racialized subjects. Third, it asks how the postmemory of the Holocaust is represented in this fiction and how it interlocks with the postmemory of the Stalinist terror. Finally, it investigates the memory of the Soviet Union itself and ask what is remembered and how in this respect.
2Literary works that I term “post-Soviet Jewish American literature” (Krasuska) are produced by writers who as children immigrated to the United States and Canada in the 1980s and 1990s from the Soviet Union or former Soviet Union. This grouping includes the names of writers who co-initiated this subgenre in the early-mid 2000s: Gary Shteyngart, David Bezmozgis, Lara Vapnyar and others, such as Ellen Litman, Anya Ulinich, Keith Gessen, Sana Michael Idov, Nadia Kalman, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Boris Fishman, and Julia Alekseyeva. Thanks to awards they received and their publishing in national media, these writers have become visible Jewish voices in the US and, in some cases, broadly recognizable in the mainstream, also because of literary quality of their work.
3The singularity of this grouping of writers has been clearly noted by literary and cultural studies scholars. Yet, they used designations that pointed toward other influences and types of conditioning. Slavic studies scholars stressed the Russianness and spoke about “Russian hybrid writers” (Ryan). Jewish Studies scholars wrote about “American Jewish Russian” (Rovner), “Soviet-born émigré Jewish writers” (Senderovitch), where “émigré” seemed to connect the current group of writers to earlier waves of Russian immigrants. In my categorization, I point to my academic provenance in American Studies and my research interest in Jewishness, while using “post-Soviet” as a modifier. My designation of literary texts as “post-Soviet” more generally points to the Soviet conditioning of this literature. “Post-Soviet” is not a temporal designation here, but rather a quality of being turned toward the past, the Soviet past, which is close to Alexander Etkind’s understanding of the term. This is also a past characterized by the particular status of Soviet Jews in the USSR, an oxymoronic “discriminated elite” (Remennick), with their Jewishness divorced from religious observance.
4Poradzieckie consists of four parts: Przestrzenie [Spaces], Wspólnoty [Communities], Historie [Histories] and Genealogie [Genealogies]. In the contemporary Jewish American literature Eastern European space, a space, marked by Shoah narratives, is often beyond time, technological development, undergoing orientalization. Referring to the concept of metageography understood as a “set of spacial structures that order our knowledge about the world,” in part one I demonstrate how post-Soviet Jewish American writers recreate categorizations of space and renew its meanings (cf. Lewis and Wigen). It is especially the case in the texts set both in North America and Eurasia at the turn of the 21st century, e.g. Anja Ulinich’s Petropolis, Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s Panic in the Suitcase, the readings of which constitute Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 respectively.
5The three chapters in the second part Wspólnoty [Communities] illustrates how the sense of community – and the lack thereof – shapes this fiction. In reading David Bezmozgis’s Natasha from Natasha and Other Stories in Chapter 3, I point to the failures of based transnational Jewish community of immigrants. In Chapter 4, Nadia Kalman’s The Cosmopolitans is an occasion to show solidarities with other migrant ethnicities. Finally, David Bezmozgis’s The Free World shows the significant absence of Israel in this fiction, when compared with non-immigrant Jewish American writing.
6Part three Historie [Histories] centers on the memory of WWII and the Holocaust. The ways in which it is represented in this fiction fulfill different functions, conditioned by the Soviet past. In Chapter 6, in David Bezmozgis’s The Free World the memory of WWII and the Jewish Soviet soldier takes the center stage. Then in Chapter 7, devoted to David Bezmozgis’s “An Animal to the Memory” from Natasha and Other Stories and Boris Fishman’s A Replacement Life, its americanized memorial culture gets a critical treatment. These texts, then, modify what is remembered and memorialized, how and to what end; their analysis follows and extends the concepts of multidirectional memory (Rothberg) and palimpsestic memory (Silverman), while paying attention to the literary conventions of representation.
7The most recent post-Soviet Jewish American writing seems to have less affinity with Jewish American literature from the second half of the 20th century, but rather mirror Brahati Mukherjee’s thesis on contemporary migrant literature that it transcends the assimilationist paradigm and turns to country of origin of the author-immigrant. The last part – Genealogie [Genealogies] – is devoted to narratives that take place in Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union, and show the relationships and genealogies of women. Chapter 8 concerns women’s (non)genealogy of Holocaust memory in Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter, in which the author tells a story about the life of her great-grandmother in the Soviet Union. Then Chapter 9 monograph turns to the memory of the late Soviet Union. In Ellen Litman’s Mannequin Girl, Lary Vapnyar’s The Scent of Pine and her short story “Lydia’s Grove,” perestroika becomes another place of Jewish memory in English. In the works analyzed here, narratives about the body and sexuality serve as a vehicle for a story about communist memory, which only occasionally touches on Jewishness.
8The monograph fills a blind spot in the research of the body of literary texts by Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish immigrants to North America, which through awards and media presence become more and more visible. Through its object of study and the adopted research perspective, this project contributes to the important strain of research trying to diversify the canonized narratives of Jewishness and especially American Jewishness (cf. Levy and Schachter).

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