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| Yom Kippur in Amsterdam
ISBN: 9780815651055
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Syracuse University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Immigrants; Jews Russian; Jews;
Professor and memoirist Shrayer (Waiting for America) delivers eight deliberate stories about educated, accomplished Russians who have uneasily settled in America. Many of these tales viscerally reveal the inability to shed one's past, as in "Sonetchka," named for the upwardly mobile emigree protagonist who has attained financial success but has left her Russian husband, Igor, to fall into drunkenness, despair and, possibly, vengeance against her. "The Afterlove" is a recollection of postwar first love conjured by Pavel Lidin, who encountered a mermaid at a summer lake camp when he was 13 and later married his best friend's pregnant girlfriend. In two stories, the Jewish Russian protagonist endures a breakup with a gentile woman: in "The Disappearance of Zalman," Mark loses his girlfriend once she meets his yeshiva tutor and is smitten by his "passionate" Jewish nature, while in the title story, a businessman in Amsterdam, feeling guilty for having told his fiancee that he wants a Jewish wife, finds atonement in the city of easy morals. The stories are competently written and soundly constructed, though readers may feel they've read them before. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Maxim D. Shrayer is professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College. Among his books are The World of Nabokov's Stories, Russian Poet/Soviet Jew, and the literary memoir Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration. A bilingual author and translator, Shrayer won the National Jewish Book Award for the two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature. |
