Russian Jews as American Writers: A New Paradigm for Jewish Multiculturalism?

Since the mid-1970s more than 1.5 million Russian-speaking Jews have left the Soviet Union and its successor states. Some of them have become writers in the languages of their host countries, and in doing so they have helped to create a new global genre of what one could call translingual Russian diaspora fiction.¹ In the United States, Gary Shteyngart's novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2002) has initiated an ongoing boom of Russian American and Russian Canadian immigrant literature, which includes such authors as Lara Vapnyar, David Bezmozgis, Ellen Litman, Anya Ulinich, Sana Krasikov, Irina Reyn, and Maxim D. Shrayer, among others. All of these authors are at least nominally Jewish, a fact that has not escaped the attention of Jewish American critics and scholars. Donald Weber observes that these authors "represent a fascinating new chapter in a long tradition of Jewish immigrant writing." As such, Weber believes that they provide a living refutation of the so-called "Howe doctrine"—the prediction of the decline and ultimate demise of Jewish American literature.² Andrew Furman echoes these sentiments: "Make no mistake. Shteyngart and his peers, who have contributed mightily in bringing the Jewish voice to the center of our literary culture, are good for the Jews." As Furman puts it, "blessed with the great good fortune of immigrant oppression, persecution, poverty and nightmares, [these writers] claim an artistic kinship to Bellow, Roth and Malamud—that holy trinity—that the rest of us born-here Jews can't quite claim" ("Russification").

Ironically, under the existing multicultural rubric, personal hardship appears to be advantageous for an author, since it facilitates inclusion into artistic canons reserved for oppressed and victimized minorities. From Furman's perspective, the Russian newcomers proved to be a godsend: as refugees from a grim and distant place, less assimilated, less "white," so to speak, they seemed better positioned than their gentrified American cousins to claim a Jewish share of the multicultural bonanza. Earlier, Furman criticized the exclusion of Jewish writers from the multicultural academic canon (Contemporary). Now, thanks to the arrival of the post-Soviet émigrés on the literary scene, here was finally an opportunity to rectify this injustice. Not everybody agrees with this assessment, to be sure. In 2006, Adam Rovner struck a more skeptical note, suggesting that the enthusiasm of Jewish critics for the Russian immigrants expresses a desire for "a vicarious Jewish distinctiveness that only underscores the successful acculturation of earlier generations of Jews into the American mainstream," given that these writings occasionally descend into "a self-referential, jokey pastiche of Jewish difference" (317). Morris Dickstein also connects the Jewish identity of Russian immigrant writers with a somewhat skeptical view of the concept of multiculturalism, noting that "once these writers arrived in North America, they all turned more Jewish, as if licensed by the strong Jewish presence in American literary culture, but also by a multicultural environment that equates ethnic identity with personal authenticity" (129).

Enlisting these writers for the cause of Jewish multiculturalism becomes complicated because of their triple identities as Jews, Russians, and Americans. This mixed status makes them multicultural, but how exactly does their Jewishness coexist with the other two components of their identity? How can we be so sure that the "Jewish voice" they have allegedly brought to the center of American literary culture is not rather a Russian voice? On the level of public recognition, there seems to be little doubt about the bona fide Jewish credentials of the post-Soviet newcomers. Practically all their debut books have been honored with awards from Jewish organizations. Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Vapnyar's There Are Jews in My House (2003), Ulinich's Petropolis (2007), and Reyn's What Happened to Anna K. (2008) received the Goldberg Prize for Emerging Writers of Jewish Fiction from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. Shteyngart's novel was also honored with the National Jewish Book Award. Bezmozgis's Natasha and Other Stories (2005) garnered the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, while Krasikov's One More Year (2008) was awarded the...