V IMMIGRATSII

In Raydun’s novel, a Jewish family recounts their tale of emigration from the Soviet Union.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, a young student named Benjamin is in Israel with his great-grandparents, Iliya and Frida Mikhailovich; his grandparents, Raya and Sergey; his mother, Rita; and his Aunt Marianna. Eager for a break from the monotony of the lockdown, Benjamin asks his family about their immigration history for a school paper he’s writing. He learns that when Israel sought the repatriation of Jewish people from the Soviet Union, Iliya, his wife, and their children—seeing this as the family’s way out of Ukraine—lied about having Jewish relatives in Israel to secure their departure. The narrative follows the family, which, after contending with suspicious guards and bag searches, takes multiple trains before reaching Vienna. While there, the family struggles with discrimination and culture shock, most notably in the markets: “Raya hated the supermarkets in Vienna. The audacity of the abundance set her skin on fire.” Later, the family heads to Rome to be closer to the American Embassy, with their sights ultimately set on immigrating to the United States. Rome is where the women of the family (save for Raya, who is tormented by her fears of the outside world and the ills it may bestow upon her children) thrive as Frida opens an unofficial medical clinic and Rita quickly learns the Italian language. Marianna often goes to the beach with Iliya, and it is there she catches the eye of a young Italian boy named Luca. (As her mother notes, “Marianna did inherit every family member’s best features and left the less favorable ones to her sister.”) The men have less luck: Sergey feels intense guilt because his desire for a better life for his children meant abandoning his parents, and Iliya experiences an emotional crisis, thinking, “If this was his life’s dream coming true, then why was he feeling as if he were being buried alive the second he was finally free?” In alternating, present-set chapters, Benjamin peppers his family with questions and has them explain aspects of their story that are foreign to his experience as “the spoiled brat of the family.”

Raydun’s tale bears emotional heft, ironically stemming mainly from the two characters who receive the least amount of focus in the story: Iliya has dementia in the present, but his brief instants of lucidity are moving; equally stirring is Rita’s present-day understanding of herself as an afterthought in the family, essentially left to fend for herself. Unfortunately, more time is given to Marianna’s love life. The story is an important one, rooted in actual immigration history, but the prose could be a bit more elevated. Additionally, while the lockdown chapters are necessary, the switching between past and present is too frequent and interrupts the fluidity of the narrative. Still, this is an engaging tale about a specific wave of immigration about which relatively little has been explored.

An emotionally stirring narrative somewhat blunted by structural problems.