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There are Jews in My House
by Lara Vapnyar
(Pantheon, 2003)

Reviewed by Lev Feigin

According to academic legend, when an acclaimed novelist was being considered for a tenured position at Harvard the literary theorist and linguist par excellence, Roman Jakobson, quipped to his colleagues in the department: “Gentlemen, an elephant might be the largest animal on the planet, but that’s no reason for us to make it a zoology professor.” Jakobson’s troubled analogy bluntly encapsulated the convoluted relations between the academic critic and the creative writer. For Jakobson and his war-time peers, the ideal scholar of literature was a white-gowned, dispassionate taxonomist and zookeeper of belle lettres; the author—only a delicate, albeit rare specimen for the critic’s bloodless autopsies and dissections.

But times have changed, and Jakobson’s dream of turning the literary department into a scientific laboratory no longer rings true. Here at the Graduate Center our faculty can boast a number of writers-cum-scholars—the now common crossbreeds of postmodern academy who can please a jargon-loving, lecture-hall audience of specialists no sooner than they can rouse the general public with a best-selling novel or a collection of poems. Jakobson’s dichotomy was recently challenged once again here at the GC, when one of our scholars at the department of Comparative Literature published a insightful debut collection of short stories.

The critic and writer in question is none other than Lara Vapnyar. You might have seen her new collection, There are Jews in My House, proudly displayed next to the recent monographs of tenured faculty in the display case on the fourth floor. Lara is a second-year graduate student in the department and like many of us is still on the familiar wild goose chase for a dissertation topic. When ten years ago she made the permanent move with her husband from Moscow to Brooklyn, her English—in part learned from spirited Soviet textbook passages about Lenin abroad—was almost non-existent. Ten years later she has had two short stories in The New Yorker, the recent collection and an interview with Vogue to boot. Vapnyar is lauded by many critics as one of the most promising new literary voices in the nation.

There are Jews in My House comprises six stories, of which only one takes place this side of the late Iron Curtain. The rest of the stories take us back to the heydays of the Soviet Union and grapple with more than fifty years of its existence: the collection opens with a story of occupied war-torn Russia and at the end leaves us in post-Gorbachev, early nineties mayhem.

If you’re like me and you simply find no room in your grad school-battered heart for the slow-roasted, grandmother-meets-cancer-meets-coming-of-age, so-what predictability now dusting in your local Barnes & Noble, than Vapnyar’s collection is just what the critic ordered. Here all themes are guaranteed to be MFA-free. Nothing sounds nor feels familiar. Even sick Russian grannies, rather than taking on the roles of predictably warmhearted, bliny-frying babushkas, turn out to be only gossipy hypochondriacs from immigrant Brooklyn who pride themselves—to the dismay of their grandchildren-translators—on being able to describe “with vividness and precision” the intricacies of their bowel movements to their English-speaking doctors.

Nor will you find in the collection any stylistic Pilates that we see in many recent débuts. Vapnyar writes in a prose that is as simple as it is to the point; the storyteller uses just enough paint for her canvas to suspend our disbelief and lead us from the page into the unpredictable world of dour, smoked-filled Soviet kitchens, monochrome pre-fabricated apartment buildings, identical supermarkets, and nostalgia-steeped summer dachas with their hidden dramas and colorful alcoholics for neighbors.

Few writers in English had covered the Soviet territory quite as well as Vapnyar. While in the last few years Eastern European immigrant voices have come out from the Cold War closet with unflinching insiders accounts of the “Wild East,” the Soviet Union of the seventies and eighties really belongs to this collection. Without turning her literary revisits of the motherland into maudlin walks down memory lane, or worse, cliché-studded, ready-made trips into oversimplification, Vapnyar is able to present her history-scarred nation with unfeigned warmth and genuine understanding.

What makes these imaginary returns even more remarkable is that the strange, now vanished Atlantis that was the USSR is made even stranger, for in most of the stories Vapnyar reveals it from the child’s vantage point. In “Ovrashki’s Trains,” for instance, a young girl spends a summer with her grandparents and mother in their dacha. Every evening she runs to the station to greet the day’s trains from Moscow in hopes that her father might one day step onto the platform and come back home. But by the end, the five-year old discovers the hard truth of her father’s absence and the perfectly chiseled prose of the story goes into an elegiac overdrive:

“My father died in a little town on the Black Sea, when the sky and sea were of the same cobalt-blue color and the ships that came into the harbor looked startlingly white in the blinding southern sun. The coffin with my father’s body traveled to Moscow on a freight train in a dark car made of thick red boards knocked together, along with some factory equipment in plywood boxes.”

Whether in “Lydia’s Grove” visiting with her mother another female writer who just doesn’t seem to be quiet like everyone else, or in “A Question for Vera” being derisively told by a precocious girl at their boot camp-styled kindergarten that she is “a Jewess,” Vapnyar’s fictional children always offer us a surprising angle onto an already unfamiliar landscape.

Perhaps it is this unfamiliarity that really makes this collection so wonderful. Russia is seen from the shores of Brooklyn, America from the streets of Moscow, adult sexuality from the point of view of children, and Russian-Jewish relations from the perspective of friendly anti-Semites. The stereoscopic effect alone makes the collection a rare gem beaming at once with both innocence and experience.

Lev Feigin is a student in the Comparative Literature department.