Soviet-Born

The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction

By Karolina Krasuska

Rutgers University Press

In 2010, when The New Yorker published a list of twenty writers under the age of forty who were “key to their generation,” it included five Jewish-identified writers, two of whom—American Gary Shteyngart and Canadian David Bezmozgis—were Soviet-born. This publicity came after nearly a decade of English-language literary output by Soviet-born writers of all genders in North America. Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction traces the impact of these now numerous authors—among others, David Bezmozgis, Boris Fishman, Keith Gessen, Sana Krasikov, Ellen Litman, Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, and Lara Vapnyar—on major coordinates of the Jewish American imaginary.

Entering an immigrant, Soviet-born standpoint creates an alternative and sometimes complementary pattern of how the Eastern and Central European past and present resonate with American Jewishness. The novels, short stories, and graphic novels considered here often stage strikingly fresh variations on key older themes, including cultural geography, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, communism, gender and sexuality, genealogy, and finally, migration. Soviet-Born demonstrates how these diasporic writers, with their critical stance toward identity categories, open up the field of what is canonically Jewish American to broader contemporary debates.

This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.

A Greyhound bus dream of sitting next to Philip Roth who recommends reading Bernard Malamud, an imagined encounter between a Russian-born nurse and Jonathan Safran Foer, and invocations of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anton Chekhov, and Sholem Aleichem. Based on interviews with the authors and careful readings of their works, Karolina Krasuska’s Soviet-Born draws a broad and vividly illustrated panorama of contemporary writing by migrants from the former Soviet Union, challenging comforting American Cold War clichés as well as the narrow norms of generalized Jewish genealogies. Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University

Karolina Krasuska’s beautifully written, revelatory study of twenty-first century Soviet-born Jewish writers published in English powerfully rethinks the category of 'Jewish-American literature' to expose its hierarchies and blind spots. Richly informed by critical frameworks from gender, migration, and memory studies, Soviet-Born simultaneously demonstrates the broader resonances of the alternative literary archive it uncovers. Sarah Casteel, author of Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art

Soviet-Born offers an exciting and much-needed reframing of the Jewish American canon. Through thoughtful and theoretically informed close readings, Krasuska elegantly demonstrates how this dynamic and creative generation of Soviet-born immigrant Jewish writers, including Anya Ulinich and David Bezmozgis, challenge the doxa of Jewish American literature, speaking back to its masculinist and nationalist norms. Allison Schachter, author of Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939

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. Los Angeles Review of Books

KAROLINA KRASUSKA is an associate professor at the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw, Poland, and a founding member of its Gender/Sexuality Research Group. She is a coeditor of Women and the Holocaust: New Perspectives and Challenges and the Polish translator of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.

Preface
Introduction: Soviet-Born Writing