The Russo-American Memorialization of Soviet Anti-Semitism by Masha Gessen and Sana Krasikov

• In Event: Documenting the Violence: Minoritized Identities and Trauma in the Works of Russian and American Writers

Abstract

This paper will study the literary representation and memorialization of Soviet anti-Semitism in Masha Gessen’s “Esther and Ruzya” (2004) and Sana Krasikov’s “The Patriots” (2017), in the light of both authors’ connections to the Soviet Union and the United States in terms of their familial legacies, origin, and nationality. Despite some obvious genre discrepancies (i.e., Gessen’s autofictionalized biography of her two Jewish grandmothers v. Krasikov’s fictional elaboration of the character of NYC-born Florence Fein, later a transplant to Moscow), the two works shed light on the state-sponsored discrimination against Soviet Jews, even if they happened to sincerely sympathize with and pledge allegiance to communism and the Soviet state’s internationalist agenda. I shall investigate the notorious tropes of Jews’ perennial uprootedness, suspicious “cosmopolitanism” (i.e., associations with the capitalist West), and alleged “statelessness” (synonymous with disloyalty/betrayal/espionage), which ultimately resulted in the GULAG incarceration that ruined lives and shattered any hope of belonging to a once coveted supra-ethnic whole, against the protagonists’ idealistic and painstaking efforts to blend in during Stalin’s era—thus celebrating the postmemorial endeavor of Gessen and Krasikov, who memorialized these tragic archives of Jewish women’s suffering in their English-written works.

Author

• Alex Pekov, Columbia U