No longer at home in Russia, but not quite assimilated into the
American mainstream, the daily lives of Russian immigrants are
fueled by a combustible mix of success and alienation. Simon
Reznikov, the Boston-based immigrant protagonist of Maxim D.
Shrayer's A Russian Immigrant, is restless. Unresolved feelings
about his Jewish (and American) present and his Russian (and
Soviet) past prevent Reznikov from easily putting down roots in his
new country. A visit to a decaying summer resort in the Catskills,
now populated by Jewish ghosts of Soviet history, which include a
famous emigre writer, reveals to Reznikov that he, too, is a
prisoner of his past. An expedition to Prague in search of clues
for an elusive Jewish writer's biography exposes Reznikov's own
inability to move on. A chance reunion with a former Russian lover,
now also an immigrant living in an affluent part of Connecticut,
unearths memories of Reznikov's last Soviet summer while
reanimating many contradictors of a mixed, Jewish-Russian marriage.
Told both linearly and non-linearly, with elements of suspense,
mystery and crime, these three interconnected novellas gradually
reveal many layers of Simon Reznikov's Russian, Jewish, and Soviet
past. Vectors of love and desire, nostalgia and amnesia, violence
and forgiveness, politics and aesthetics guide Shrayer's immigrant
characters while also disorienting them in their new American
lives. Set in Providence, New Haven and Boston, but also in places
of the main character's pilgrimages such as Estonia and Bohemia,
Shrayer's book weaves together a literary manifesto of Russian Jews
in America.
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