V Immigratsii
In pandemic lockdown together, family members from four generations are prompted to share their stories in the revealing historical novel V Immigrastsii.
Four generations of a Russian Jewish family share their memories of fleeing from the Soviet Union in Marina Raydun’s novel V Immigrastsii.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a tight-knit Russian Jewish family quarantines together. In this setting, Benjamin asks his family why they left the USSR in the late 1980s. Three generations air out the story: Benjamin’s grandparents, Frida and Iliya; his grandparents, Raya and Sergey; and his mother, Rita, and his aunt and uncle, Marianna and Luca. With Benjamin as their interlocutor and recorder, the elders take turns recalling their life-altering journey as Jewish refugees fleeing communism, headed to Austria, Italy, and Israel. They reveal secrets, surprises, and significant emotional trauma.
Alternating between the past and present and shifting between multiple perspectives, the story builds upon itself with care, uncovering myriad personal impacts of immigration in the process. For example, Raya recalls hating the supermarkets in Vienna: “The audacity of the abundance set her skin on fire.” Such memories, marked by acerbic wit, flesh out their various instances of culture shock well. Also illuminating are the ways the family members argue and bicker with one other—often to Benjamin’s amusement and exasperation.
In the course of this grand family reunion–cum–reckoning, the novel shifts fluidly in tone between comedic and bittersweet. The deeper it goes into recalling the family’s travels—including their trek out of Austria to Italy, where they awaited interviews with the US embassy to enter the nation as refugees—the more is revealed. Indeed, each speaker uncovers a piece of a larger puzzle, revealing the parts of themselves that clashed with the new cultures they encountered. Russian and Italian terms punctuate their tales for verisimilitude, and their cacophonous sharing, which evinces their commitment to staying together, is emotive: “The living room breathed with reveries, murmurs of remember, in multiple languages.”
Its prose wistful, even as its dialogue is sometimes combative, the novel progresses through its affectionate intergenerational exchanges with appeal. Moments of hilarity are used to balance out its harder revelations, as with the trying issues that the members of the family faced as poor Jewish refugees learning new languages, forging new lives, and finding new love. In the process of their sharing, Benjamin begins to see his family members in a new light; they, in turn, begin to understand one another even better.
A warm literary tour de force, V Immigrastsii is a revealing intergenerational novel about a family that survives and stays together through tough shifts in circumstance.
Reviewed by
Peggy Kurkowski
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