Parallel Universes: Multiple Identities in the Russian Jewish American Memoir

• In Event: Cultural Mobility in Jewish Literature

Abstract

Matters of assimilation, acculturation, and maintenance of a distinct identity within the immigrant experience have been widely interrogated in the field of American Literature. However, questions examining transnational identity, diverse political and social attachments, and the periphery of existence in immigrant memoirs seldom become methods of inquiry. Three new memoirs by contemporary, immigrant writers from the former Soviet Union: MASTERING THE ART OF SOVIET COOKING (2013) by Anya von Bremzen, LEAVING RUSSIA: A JEWISH STORY (2013) by Maxim D. Shrayer, and LITTLE FAILURE (2013) by Gary Shteyngart address the Russian Jewish identity of the impecunious Soviet transplant in the West through the lenses of food, humor, and scholarship. The three works share the motif of exploring an “in-between identity”. While in the Soviet Union Jews were not considered Russians, in America these writers are for the first time being seen as Russian. I will argue that these memoirs highlight the experience of Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants in the process of negotiating their hybrid identity. This paper will consider the translocation of self in these works, the idealization of the immigrant experience, and the memoirists’ quest to explore their fluid, transnational identities. This article will map the transnational spaces that demarcate works where identity is not fixed but constantly mutable. Finally, it will explore the marginality and fusion of the previously Russian, but presently American, Jewish self in the 20th and 21st centuries.

author

• Anna Katsnelson, Medgar Evers College