Karolina Krasuska. Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction

The critical impulse of the most exciting work in Jewish American literary studies in recent years has been deconstructionist, what Karolina Krasuska, in her important, critically engaged new work Soviet-Born, describes as “a robust metacritical impulse” in which scholars “self-critically examine their practice and objects of study” (1). Krasuska places herself into this lineage from the book’s opening pages, in which she positions her project as “participating in the recent critique of Jewish American literary criticism and its search for more expansive formulas in terms of both the literary texts that fall within its purview and the critical perspectives that form its core” (6). While much of the work in (what is typically called) Critical Jewish Studies has been on the “Jewish” side of the “Jewish American” equation, where the focus has been on providing a critical examination of the racialized identitarian underpinnings of the field, Soviet-Born begins problematizing the “American” aspect of the “Jewish American” rubric as well. This conceptual shift is marked in Soviet-Born by a turn to the keywords of “migration,” “Cold War,” and “space” over the traditional themes of race, assimilation, and identity that have underpinned even the most advanced critical work in Jewish American studies.Soviet-Born is particularly interested in the possibilities opened up by a focus on migration as a way to escape those traditional themes. Krasuska’s book focuses not on questions about ethnicity but instead engages with contemporary global questions raised by the figure of the migrant—including borders, the legal order, and the nation-state itself—that disrupt the logic of Jewish exceptionalism and the identitarian drive to link the arrival of Soviet Jews with earlier waves of Jewish immigrants from the twentieth century. This is reflected in the book’s focus on authors born in the former Soviet Union who came to the United States as children or young adults and who have published in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, in particular Anya Ulinich, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, David Bezmozgis, Boris Fishman, Julia Alekseyeva, Sana Krasikov, Keith Gessen, Ellen Litman, Lara Vapnyar, Nadia Kalman, and Gary Shteyngart. For these authors, the “Jewish American” label represents an awkward fit, with their works raising questions about the assumptions underpinning the category, be they historical, national, or sociological. Indeed, in Krasuska’s presentation, the texts are linked more by their questioning of the Jewish American literary framework itself than the literary market’s imposition on them of a common Soviet Jewish legibility. All highly self-aware, the texts examined in Soviet-Born, while fictional, examine many of the same questions that have animated recent scholarship in Jewish American studies, at times engaging intertextually with authors from the same Jewish American canon—such as Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud—around which the field has been constructed. As such, “with their self-referentiality and intertextuality, these texts supply a theorization of the field itself” (122).This new corpus of texts therefore allows Krasuska to challenge the field along two key vectors. First, this group of authors has only recently received significant scholarly attention in a Jewish Studies context, and so Soviet-Born is bringing new voices into the field’s academic discussion and furthering the expansion of the canon called for by Lori Harrison-Kahan and Josh Lambert in their introduction to a 2012 MELUS special issue (a call to action Krasuska mentions in both her Introduction and Conclusion).1Second, Krasuska’s deployment of the category of “Soviet-born” breaks down assumptions embedded in the field, turning our attention to the entanglement of Jewish American literary history with the Cold War and working to disrupt identitarian categories for literary organization. As Krasuska argues, “Soviet-born” as an organizing principle for her corpus foregrounds questions about the relations of her texts with the Soviet political system and Cold War geopolitics, while leaving open a determination of the various authors’ national origins, relations to Jewishness, and present identifications.While the book therefore begins from an engagement with Jewish Studies and makes its major critical intervention in that scholarly literature, Krasuska explicitly aims to build a dialogue with other fields. In particular, Krasuska draws on her background in gender and sexuality studies—she is the founder of the Gender/Sexuality Research Group at the University of Warsaw and the Polish translator of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble—in approaching literature from the perspective of feminist and queer theory. Women writers are therefore front and center in Soviet-Born, representing well over half of the authors discussed, but questions of gender and sexuality play a role in all her readings, inflecting questions as diverse as Holocaust memory, Soviet citizenship, and solidarity between migrant groups. Soviet-Born therefore challenges not only the masculine biases of Jewish American literature and criticism but provides a broader challenge to patriarchal assumptions through its attention to the unique experience of Soviet women in relation to gender norms.Each chapter in Soviet-Born is built around two or three literary texts—novels, short stories, and graphic novels—published between 2002 and 2022, sometimes supplemented by author interviews (including some conducted by Krasuska herself). The wide range of themes covered in these chapters reflects Krasuska’s ambition in utilizing the capaciousness of her “Soviet-born” framework to intervene in numerous areas. The first chapter examines Anya Ulinich’s Petropolis and Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s Panic in a Suitcase to examine the ways in which their migration narratives actualize locations in the former USSR, pushing against a separateness and nostalgia often found in Jewish American presentations of Eastern Europe. The second chapter discusses David Bezmozgis’s The Free World, Boris Fishman’s A Replacement Life, and Julia Alekseyeva’s Soviet Daughter in order to explore the place of the Holocaust in Soviet Jewish memory, as well as how that memory is reshaped by experiences of migration. The third chapter focuses on Sana Krasikov’s The Patriots and Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country to complicate narratives of the Cold War, and the afterlives of the Jewish relation to Communism, through the lens of the affective transgenerational ties across both American and Russian leftism. The fourth chapter is the most explicitly focused on issues of gender and sexuality, covering Ellen Litman’s Mannequin Girl and Lara Vapnyar’s novel The Scent of Pine and short story “Lydia’s Grove.” The fifth and final chapter is where Krasuska presents her deepest theoretical engagement with her overarching migration theme, arguing for reading Nadia Kalman’s The Cosmopolitans, David Bezmozgis’s “Immigrant City,” and Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success as interrogations of the prevailing US frameworks of ethnic identity and gendered Jewish American genealogy.For Krasuska, the various questions around Jewishness, migration, Cold War history, the assumptions of Jewish American studies, memory, gender, and sexuality raised in these chapters are all interlinked, with Soviet-born writing offering a site for broader cultural critique that helps facilitate an exploration of the potential contribution which attention to the category of “Jewish American” might make to literary studies more generally. This is a large goal, and at times the range of theoretical discourses that Soviet-Born engages with can become overwhelming, so that chapters and themes don’t always fully speak to each other. The key for Krasuska, however, is to showcase the ways in which various vectors of analysis can be “Jewishly” inflected without becoming subsumed in the identitarian and Cold War assumptions underpinning the field of Jewish American studies. As such, Soviet-Born opens out the frameworks of Jewish Studies as currently conceived, offering the field numerous avenues for further investigation and critical reflection, and provides thought-provoking analytical insights of interest to scholars in a wide range of fields.Soviet-Born confirms that the meta-critical reevaluation that has powered the field of Jewish American Studies since the 1990s isn’t yet slowing. Indeed, Soviet-Born demonstrates the exciting possibilities of not simply expanding the Jewish American corpus but putting the key assumptions underpinning the field into dialogue with new approaches animating American cultural studies more broadly. Drawing on these recent insights creates a unique opportunity to put the “American” dimension of Jewish American literary studies into new relations with the field’s own pioneering of a critical understanding of Jewishness. This move promises to open Jewish American studies to new and provocative engagements across a diverse range of scholarly debates, generating fresh sets of questions for scholars of both American and Jewish American literature. The kind of innovative, critical approach represented by Soviet-Born is precisely what the field needs if it wants to continue to remain relevant in the American academy, where Jewishness has become a site of growing discursive dispute both inside the classroom and beyond it.