Today we are featuring an excerpt from Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction (Rutgers UP, 2024) by Karolina Krasuska, associate professor at the American Studies Center and co-founder of the Gender and Sexuality MA Program at the University of Warsaw, Poland. Starting in the early 2000s, Jewish immigrant writers from the former Soviet Union have appeared on the US literary scene in increasing numbers. While Gary Shteyngart, who can give lessons in self-promotion, is the most well known, the list comprises more women, including Lara Vapnyar (a Q&A with whom we have featured on this blog), Anya Ulinich, Irina Reyn, and Ellen Litman, to name only a few. As their books continued to be published, academics began to take note, organizing conference panels and writing on the subject (I am happy to have contributed to this field of study from its inception). The first and foundational monograph was Adrian Wanner’s Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Northwestern UP, 2011), which discussed the global phenomenon of ex-Soviet immigrant writers in the various countries to which they immigrated. Krasuska’s is the first academic volume specifically devoted to ex-Soviet Jews living and writing in the US, where the largest number of such immigrants resides.

Continue reading “Queering Peripheries: Lara Vapnyar’s “Lydia’s Grove”: Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction by Karolina Krasuska” →