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The Writer as Tour Guide
- Indiana University Press
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The Writer as Tour Guide ! Lara Vapnyar About a year ago I received a letter from a recent Russian immigrant who had read my work in the New Yorker. He wrote that my stories made him uncomfortable because of the overpowering figure of the presumed reader, who, as he felt, was influencing the narrative. The reader in question was a “normal, nice, educated American,” to whom the author constantly tried to explain things about Russians and Russian immigrants, to make him understand , to make him form a certain opinion, that the author would want him to make, and more importantly to persuade him to accept the author. “You are a writer, Lara, not a tour guide,” he wrote. “As long as you continue to write on these stupid immigrant topics, the ‘reader’ (that nice, educated, American one) would continue to loom above, hinder you, make you pause to consider him.” As much as I am used to the fact that Russian immigrants are my sternest critics, I was particularly affected by this comment. At first, I attempted to shrug his words off. What nonsense, I tried to tell myself. I’m not influenced by any reader, no matter how nice, normal, educated, or American he might be. I’m just writing my The Writer as Tour Guide | 93 stories the way they form in my head; I’m writing about life the way I see it, the way I’ve experienced it. And I decided to look at my stories again just to prove to myself how wrong that man was. To my great surprise, I found the proof to be the opposite, not with big screaming evidence, but little things here and there. Why would I, for example, refer to a famous Soviet newspaper as The Young Muscovite, when the correct translation of its name would be The Member of the Moscow Branch of the Youth Communist Organization? Clearly, my intent was to make it easier for the American reader. Or why would I put the words “a typical Moscow preschool” after the description of a room in another of my stories? Another proof of my touching care for American readers. Yes, that Russian man was right, I was a tour guide, and possibly a suck-up at that. Most writers don’t need much to sink into a state of deep selfdisgust , and this would be just enough for me, if I hadn’t thought of Mary Antin’s The Promised Land. Now, this was a great immigrant book, whose author didn’t shy away from serving as a tour guide for her reader, and doing so explicitly and unapologetically, to the extent that there is even a glossary of Russian and Yiddish terms appended at the volume’s end. Antin has a forceful and bold author’s persona. One doesn’t have to search for traces of the hidden dialogue with the reader in her work because she addresses the reader openly. She appears to have taken his hand and not let it go until she has led him through all the places she deems necessary for him to visit. In the first part of her book, the reader is taken on a thorough tour of a Jewish settlement in tsarist Russia, led through its streets, inside the houses, schools, and shops, and is introduced to all kinds of quirky but very real characters populating the place. In the second half of the book, the reader is led on a similar journey, this time into the anxious, overcrowded world of recently arrived [3.144.243.184] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 08:00 GMT) 94 | Lara Vapnyar Jewish immigrants in the United States. But there are no pleas for acceptance in Antin’s book; rather, one finds a resolve to explain, to make a reader understand what it was like to be a Jew in tsarist Russia and to feel what it was like to be a poor immigrant in the United States. This zealous resolve, along with a stubborn lack of objectivity, is what makes The Promised Land so fascinating. Antin doesn’t just serve as a tour guide; she takes on the role of advocate for her people, a passionate and at times violent defender of their character. She says, for example, that even if Jewish residents of Russia were often engaged in some unsavory business practices, this was because they were forced to do so, and, most importantly, they would never behave in such...