1Karolina Krasuska’s new book offers a detailed analysis of eleven novels (including a graphic one) and two short stories by eleven writers born in the Soviet Union who made America their home. Krasuska focuses in her study on new literary voices—that is, writers who entered the US in the 1980s—and persuasively argues that this new cohort of authors challenges the established Jewish American literary canon and pushes the boundaries of the category of Jewish American literature. Krasuska is not only an elegant and eloquent writer, but also a meticulous researcher, the latter corroborated by the fact that her analysis is followed by as many as eighteen pages of works cited. Apart from scholarly sources, she takes into account the interviews she conducted with the authors, not to grant the writers “interpretive authority,” but rather to “reveal the social, cultural, and political entanglements of literature as business” (Krasuska 11). The aspects addressed in the study range from cultural geography, through memory of WWII, communism, gender and sexuality regulations, to migration.

2 In the first chapter, titled “Diasporic Spaces,” the author’s primary lens is that of metageography and cultural geography, as she discusses how Anya Ulinicz’s Persepolis and Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s Panic in a Suitcase re-imagine Eastern Europe. The first book is set in Siberian and US South-West borderlands, thereby constituting a departure from locations typically depicted in Jewish American fiction. The latter text, in turn, termed by Krasuska a post-migration tourism narrative, is set partly in Odessa and partly in Brighton Beach, which by virtue of their location enables a narrative rendering of affective connection through the sea.

3The second chapter, “Redefining Survival,” offers an analysis of three texts—David Bezmozgi’s The Free World, Boris Fishman’s A Replacement Life, and Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter—that all showcase what Krasuska calls post-Soviet migrant memory of the Holocaust. Rather than privileging depictions of death camps, which seems a trademark of much Holocaust literature, all of these writers—grandchildren of Holocaust survivors themselves—offer stories not to be found in conventional narratives of Holocaust postmemory, as they feature, for example, Jewish Red Army soldiers or Jewish escapees to the East. Krasuska convincingly argues that said narratives resist a certain homogenization of Holocaust memory, forming instead part of an assemblage of Holocaust memory.

4 Chapter three, titled “Afterlives of Communism,” is a nuanced reading of two texts: Sana Krasikov’s The Patriots and Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country, both of whose protagonists are Americans traveling to Russia. Krasuska treats the former novel as an example of gulag postmemory writing in English, and points to the two texts’ deployment of disinformation and denunciation, respectively, as major tropes in their constructions of Russia.

5Late-Soviet gender and intimacy regulations aimed at producing a model citizen are Krasuska’s focus in the fourth chapter of her study, titled “Soviet Intimacy” and offering a reading of two novels and one short story: Ellen Litman’s Mannequin Girl and Lara Vapnyar’s The Scent of Pine and “Lydia’s Grove.” Litman’s book addresses state control over citizens’ bodies through her depiction of a boarding school for children with mobility disabilities, whereas Vapnyar’s novel centers around the protagonist’s memories of working at a summer camp to reflect more broadly on sex education in the USSR. In general, as Krasuska posits, gender tends to displace Jewishness as the primary axis of identity in these narratives, as the two authors focus mostly on “body and gender normativity, abortion, same-sex desire, and sex education” (84). Krasuska includes Vapnyar’s queer narrative “Lydia’s Grove” in her analysis on the grounds that the text offers a welcome corrective to mostly heteronormative accounts by Soviet-born Jewish American authors.

6 Finally, chapter five’s title—“Keyword: Migration”—points to the experience of immigration as a foremost factor in post-Soviet Jewish American writing. Krasuska argues here that Nadia Kalman’s The Cosmopolitans can be read as an instance of queering genealogy, as the novel is narrated by a multiplicity of voices, Jewish and non-Jewish, immigrant and American-born. David Bezmozgi’s short story “Immigrant City,” in turn, problematizes solidarity based on shared experience of refugeehood through its depiction of interaction between two refugees in Toronto, one Soviet and the other Somali. The last literary text discussed by Krasuska is Gary Shteyngart’s novel Lake Success, which brings to the fore the lucrative character of the profession of an ethnic writer.

7 All in all, Krasuska’s commendable study is a must-read for scholars and students of Jewish American literature. The author demonstrates that even when the thematic preoccupations of the writers under study mirror those present in earlier Jewish American writing, they nevertheless offer new takes, and take their readers to new locations and along new trajectories. The increasing focus on gender and race in this body of literature suggests potential affinities with non-Jewish individuals of minority status. One more note-worthy aspect of Krasuska’s scrupulous analysis is her compelling discussion of book covers whose oftentimes Orientalizing character contrasts with the narratives themselves, reiterating an important point of literature being also, or perhaps primarily, a business.