Cyrillic Cycles:

Abstract

The most recent generation of Jewish American authors—those following in the wake created by Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick—has distinguished its voice in various ways. Whether it be through a return to religious orthodoxy, a renewal of folkloric techniques, an awareness of post-Holocaust conundrums, a commitment (or reaction) to Zionist expression, or an engagement with multiculturalism and identity politics, these writers have created a body of writing that defiantly challenges Irving Howe's ill-fated and oft-quoted prediction in 1977—two years after Daniel Walden founded Studies in American Jewish Literature—that Jewish American fiction had reached its high point and, given the twilight of the immigrant experience, was at an impasse (16). The robust narratives of Steve Stern, Allegra Goodman, Nathan Englander, and Dara Horn speak not only to the vitality of Jewish writing in the United States but to the state of American literature as a whole. Yet while many scholars have discussed the distinctive nature of contemporary Jewish American writing on a thematic level—for example, the awareness of religious custom, the Holocaust, Israel, postmodern culture1—few have noted any distinctiveness of form. And while it would be erroneous to hold that this most recent generation has privileged a particular genre of writing, it would not be inaccurate to suggest that, with those who create fiction, the narrative cycle has been represented inordinately.A cursory look at the output of Jewish American authors since the mid-1980s reveals a striking tendency toward the cycle form.2 This is especially the case with first works of fiction, where writers initially establish their voices and, in the process, build a literary beachhead. Now prominent authors such as Goodman, Michael Chabon, Thane Rosenbaum, Nathan Englander, and Melvin Jules Bukiet all relied on the genre when publishing their first or second books.3 And although in many cases these authors' works have been marketed and reviewed as collections of stories, or in some cases novels, a closer reading of the texts would suggest that they actually function as short-story cycles, a vibrant yet relatively neglected hybrid genre that possesses characteristics of both the traditional story collection and the more conventional novel. It stands out from the former in that the various narratives composing the text are significantly linked in some way. Whereas the individual stories in most traditional collections are disparate and unique, the components that make up a story cycle maintain a consistency in terms of character, setting, chronology, imagery, and even theme. In this way, story cycles encourage a more novelistic reading, since the narratives more directly, or more naturally, flow one from the other or build upon one another. Yet they stand out from traditional novels in that the narrative unity among their various segments—the stories or “chapters”—is much weaker. In this way, a specific story within a cycle can easily stand on its own (such as in an anthology or a reader) outside of the collection, whereas a chapter of a novel could lose much of its meaning or impact when extricated from its context.An equally notable phenomenon in recent Jewish American writing has been the arrival of Russian émigrés. Authors such as Gary Shteyngart, Anya Ulinich, Lara Vapnyar, Michael Idov, Olga Grushin, and Sana Krasikov have distinguished themselves through a series of well-received fiction and, as a result, are now read as a curious subset of contemporary Jewish American literature.4 Perhaps most significant, these authors have brought back to the fore many of the essential themes that first marked Jewish American writing: the in-between status of the immigrant, struggles between old world and new world mentality, guilt and shame generated by intergenerational conflicts, and ethno-religious marginalization. These are, interestingly enough, many of the characteristics that Irving Howe lamented as increasingly scarce in contemporary Jewish fiction. What is more, they largely define the works of two particular Jewish Russian émigrés, Ellen Litman and David Bezmozgis, writers who have used the short-story cycle form in their first works of fiction. Both The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories (2007) and Natasha and Other Stories (2004) use tightly interlinked yet independent narratives not only to explore the growth of a particular character but to foreground that development within the larger context of the Russian immigrant community. The hybrid cycle genre allows each author to juxtapose both individual and group awareness—of Russianness, Jewishness, and Americanness—where one is inextricably linked to the other. Or put another way, both the individual and the community become protagonists. In this manner, Litman and Bezmozgis not only write their ways into America as its latest group of immigrants but just as significant align themselves with the recent generation of Jewish American writers through working one of its most commonly employed genres. It is not important whether this generic alignment is intentional or inadvertent. What is noteworthy is the fact that these Russian-born authors reflect a growing trend in recent Jewish American fiction and by doing so participate as equals in defining the current generation.5Before looking closely at Litman's and Bezmozgis's fictions, it may first be useful to map out the critical contours of the cycle narrative, since the genre is so revealing when illustrating the interrelationship between the subject and his or her community. There have been a number of insightful studies devoted to the short-story cycle, also called the composite novel, or even the short-story sequence.6 Generally, it is defined as a text of short fictions interconnected by common threads of character, setting, and/or theme, thereby providing a more holistic reading than could be had by focusing on any one of its individual components. In the first sustained investigation into the short-story cycle, Forrest L. Ingram defined the genre as “a set of stories so linked to one another that the reader's experience of each one is modified by his experience of the others” (19), while at the same time one that “maintain[s] a balance between the individuality of each of the stories and the necessities of the larger unit” (15). Furthermore, the cycle is given a textual unity through “dynamic patterns of recurrence and development” (20). Ingram's emphasis on authorial intention in the creation of a cycle is echoed by Robert M. Luscher, who maintains that “the hand of the serious writer shapes the finished sequence according to his own aesthetic intentions” (159). Such an emphasis privileges what Ingram calls “composed cycles” or “completed cycles” (the first being a form conceived by the author from the very beginning and the latter being the conscious fulfillment of an originally unintended narrative act) over “arranged cycles,” or those in which individual stories are brought together, after their completion, so as to highlight their associative qualities (17–18).Others, however, have tended to privilege a more reader-response approach to recognizing the “larger picture” or the patterns of the various parts. For them, it is the reader who discovers the stories' connections. While Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris concur with Ingram by defining the cycle (or the “composite novel,” their preferred term) as a series of “shorter texts that—though individually complete and autonomous—are interrelated in a coherent whole according to one of more organized principles” (2), they nonetheless argue that the identification of its individual parts should be “self-contained [and] experienced independently by a reader” (11). Similarly, J. Gerald Kennedy mistrusts Ingram's assumption of an author's intent, since it precludes any fortuitously perceived narrative structure and because, in the words of Kennedy, “textual unity, like beauty, lies mainly in the eye of the beholding reader” (ix). Yet regardless of whether the connectedness of the individual stories is dictated by the author or by the reader, the distinguishing feature of the cycle narrative is its hybridity, its equal kinship to both the novel and a “mere collection” of stories. As Susan Garland Mann states, “There is only one essential characteristic of the short story cycle: the stories are both self-sufficient and interrelated” (15). Simply put, the whole of a short-story cycle is larger than the sum of its parts.Such an accommodating structure allows for a more communal approach to the narrative, and it is here where one can see the short-story cycle as a form well suited for American ethnic writing and the kinds of tensions it generates, the kind of dynamics that we will see at work in both Litman and Bezmozgis. If, as Ingram suggests, the cycle narrative is given form primarily through authorial invention, then we can read the text as an attempt to write (and understand) one's self into the context of one's cultural (Jewish or Russian or American) background. And if, as suggested by Dunn and Morris, cohesion among the stories is placed at the feet of the reader, then we can see how the genre functions as an exercise in community building, where the audience is invited to create meaning.Referring to the genre's distinguishing features—the self-sufficiency of the individual stories as well as their structured importance—James Nagel argues that “the cycle lends itself to diegetical discontinuities, to the resolutions of a series of conflicts, to the exploration of a variety of characters, to the use of a family or even a community as protagonist, to the exploration of the mores of a region or religion or ethnic group, each story revealing another aspect of the local culture” (15).7 What is more, the short-story cycle can draw attention to the problematic logic of ethnic representation, wherein unique literary subjects are seen, however unintentionally, as representative or typical figures within that ethnic community. As Noelle Brada-Williams points out, the heteroglossic nature of the form serves as a check against any tendency toward ethnically sanitized or stereotype-affirming representations. The genre can, in her words, “work towards solving the problem of representing an entire community within the necessarily limited confines of a single work by balancing a variety of representations rather than offering the single representation provided by the novel or the individual short story” (452–53). This tension between the individual and the ethnic community—or what Werner Sollors calls relations of consent (i.e., defining the self through individual choice) and those of descent (that is, acting according to familial and communal expectations)—goes to the very design of the short-story cycle, since it underscores the ongoing and interlinked negotiations between self and community.When applied to the context of contemporary Jewish American fiction, the short-story cycle as a form is particularly revealing: it provides a means through which authors can narrate subjectivity, and do so through an episodic and fragmented, yet highly interconnected, structure. Such a narrative strategy highlights the multifaceted nature of Jewish Americanness and the diverse influences—for example, religious directives, literary inheritance, media influences, cultural legacy, and the demands of the marketplace—under which present-day identity is forged. Put another way, the hybrid nature of the short-story cycle allows Jewish American writers the flexibility to represent their subject from multiple angles within the same text, much the way cubist paintings subvert uniformity of visual perspective, thereby freeing the writers from the restrictions of certain cultural, religious, or literary frameworks that might otherwise limit their narratives. These story cycles may emphasize idiosyncratic negotiations within the individual self, within the family, or within the localized Jewish community, but all of them are concerned with the ways in which history, tradition, and culture inform identity.Such concerns infuse the texts of both Bezmozgis and Litman. The individual narratives in Natasha and Other Stories, in fact, revolve around a young immigrant and his growth out of the shadows of his parents' Russian past, into the broader North American culture (in this case, Toronto), and then eventually closer to an understanding of his Jewish (and Russian) heritage. As in the early nineteenth-century immigrant narratives of Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, and Ludwig Lewisohn, Bezmozgis's story collection exposes the tensions that his protagonist and first-person narrator, Mark Berman, experience in negotiating between the world of his parents and the lure of New World assimilation. Indeed, the individual stories of Natasha are arranged in such a way that they not only suggest a bildungsroman but, perhaps more significantly, reveal the dynamics involved in ethnic identification.The collection begins with “Tapka,” the story of Mark as a first grader learning to take care of his neighbors' Lhasa Apso. At the beginning of the narrative, Bezmozgis establishes the distance between Mark (and his family) and the Russian immigrant community. Except for their dog-loving neighbors, who are also from the land of the czars, “there were no other Russians in the building [where he lives]. For this privilege, my parents paid twenty extra dollars a month in rent” (3). This remoteness is exacerbated by Mark's Jewish heritage, as he learns all too well in school. In class with the children of other Eastern European immigrants, he finds that when his teacher asks about everyone's nationality, and then calls on his classmate, Dima, “Dima says ‘Jewish.’ ‘What a shame,’ says the teacher, ‘so young and already a Jew’” (4). His family's Russian Jewishness, especially given the cause célèbre of refuseniks in the late-1970s, becomes an important signifier in the following story, “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist.” As his father is trying to establish his business, Mark notes that “as Russian Jews, recent immigrants, and political refugees, we were still a cause. We had good PR. We could trade on our history” (21). And because they are Russian Jews, they are invited to the home of Dr. Harvey Kornblum, a prominent physician in Toronto who makes it a point to help the disadvantaged newcomers. In order to thank their hosts, Mark's mother makes a fresh apple cake, and this cake is linked not only to the Berman's Jewish Russian past but also to the change in their observance under the Soviets, and thus their brand of Jewishness: Before Stalin, my great-grandmother lit the candles and made an apple cake every Friday night. In my grandfather's recollections of prewar Jewish Latvia, the candles and apple cakes feature prominently. When my mother was a girl, Stalin was already in charge, and although there was still apple cake, there were no more candles. By the time I was born, there were neither candles nor apple cake, though in my mother's mind, apple cake still meant Jewish. (30) After dinner, and after a promise from Dr. Kornblum that he will refer patients to Mark's father, Mrs. Kornblum returns the cake to his mother, stating that they try to stay kosher at home. Both grateful for the referrals and angered by the Kornblums' refusal of their gift—and, by association, their family's specific Jewish Russian history—the Bermans leave their hosts unsure where they figure in their new world. Walking back to their car, Mark contemplates, “Somewhere between Kornblum's and the Pontiac was our fate. It floated above us like an ether, ambiguous and perceptible” (36). His and his family's alienation is trifold: they are immigrants in a new land, they are Jews among other Russians, and they are “Russian Jews” in the eyes of the Western Jewish community.Mark's ties to his Russian past become more tenuous in the next story in the collection, “The Second Strongest Man.” In it, the Russian weightlifter Sergei Federenko, a champion lifter discovered by Mark's father back in the Soviet Union, visits Toronto for an international tournament. Throughout the story Mark recalls his idolization of Sergei as a young weight lifter back in Russia, but now, years later, his onetime hero is being nudged out, as if put out to pasture, by a young and upcoming contender and his trainer. Because he was a former trainer in the Soviet Union, Roman Berman is asked to judge the weightlifting competition, and during the event is confronted by a KGB agent who serves as a constant reminder of why he moved his family to Canada. “Don't ever forget,” Roman tells his young son, “This is why we left. So you never have to know people like him” (52). The waning of Sergei's influence (as a lifter and as an idol) and the dark reminders of the family's Soviet past combine in such a way that Russia no longer becomes the defining marker it had once been to his family.As a result, Russian national identity loses almost all of its resonance in Natasha after “The Second Strongest Man.” The story ends, appropriately, with the ill-defined figure of the KGB agent, whose jaw is badly inflamed due to some dental work he had received while in Toronto. As he watches his father accompany a drunk—and notably ineffectual and tamed—Sergei to a dark sedan after their last evening together, Mark notices that “the light from the car's interior was sufficient to illuminate [the agent's] swollen face” (64). It is almost as if the prominence of Russianness is being whisked out of the text, just as Sergei is being taken away by the disfigured KGB agent. What is more, the physical condition of the KGB agent functions as a visual cue, bridging the previous story, and the Roman's efforts as a physical therapist, and the next narrative, which highlights the physical atrocities against Jews. In other words, Bezmozgis uses the imagery to interweave his stories into more of a cohesive whole.As the importance of Russianness wanes in Mark's life after “The Second Strongest Man,” the opposite occurs with the ethnic side of his identity. Starting with “An Animal to the Memory,” Jewishness takes on more meaning in Mark's life. The events in this portion of the novel center around Mark's time in Hebrew school, an educational imposition placed on him by his mother. “As far as she was concerned,” the narrator reveals, “I wasn't leaving Hebrew school until I learned what it was to be a Jew” (69). The story begins, significantly enough, with references to Mark's fights in school, many of them the result of his being seen as a Russian outsider. Whereas in the previous story the protagonist had admired the strength of the weight lifter, here he is presented as “the toughest kid in Hebrew school” (71). His most vivid memory of this period concerns Holocaust Remembrance Day, an annual event where students are confronted with images and stories from the Shoah.Mark stands by a portrait of Mordecai Anilewicz, the leader of the Warsaw resistance, as the school's director, Rabbi Gurvich, recites the El Maleh Rachamim. Although he is moved by what he hears—“I felt his voice reach into me, down into that place where my mother said I was supposed to have the thing called my ‘Jewish soul’” (74)—he nonetheless ends up desecrating the event by getting into another fight, again as a result of his outsider status. After the remembrance Rabbi Gurvich takes Mark back down into the basement, where the Holocaust memorial was set up, and accuses him of actions befitting a Nazi. Muttering softly and then repeating the expression until it becomes a shout, Mark utters the words, “I'm a Jew,” in defiance of Gurvich's accusations. With tears streaming down his face, and shaking as he stands alone amid the paraphernalia of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Mark hears the rabbi remark, “Now, Berman … now maybe you understand what it is to be a Jew” (77).The placement of this story is no accident. It comes in the middle of the collection, and in this way can be read as a pivotal moment in Mark's development. It is followed by the book's title story, an encounter with another young émigré and the protagonist's seemingly aimless teenage days in his parents' basement. This is the closest that Mark comes to being unmoored, consumed into the larger Western culture beyond the reach of his family. These are days filled with meaningless sex with Natasha, his newfound and troubled Russian companion, and marijuana highs. Only after Natasha leaves him for his drug-dealing friend does he realize how meaningless his young life has become. Standing outside in his backyard, looking through a window into the basement where he had spent a good part of his teenage days masturbating and getting high, “I saw what Natasha must have seen every time she came to the house. In the full light of summer, I looked into darkness.” Feeling that he had already “crafted a new identity,” he becomes aware of “the end of my subterranean life” (110). This moment, coupled with the previous understanding on Holocaust Day of what it meant to be a Jew, signals a turn in Mark's life and sets a tone that will define the last two narratives in the collection.Both “Choynski” and “Minyan” are stories in which Mark's ethnic heritage comes to the fore. Whereas in the earlier narratives of the cycle his identity was defined against the backdrop of his Russianness—where his Jewishness is a liability, and, more times than not, the context was one of distance, difference, and alienation—in the final parts of the collection Mark enmeshes himself more in his Jewish legacy, both cultural and religious. In the penultimate story, the narrator searches for information surrounding Joe Choynski, “the greatest heavyweight never to win a title” and “America's first great fighting Jew” (114). The references to boxing link directly, or cycle back, to the previous stories in the collection that foreground fighting and corporality, namely, “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist,” “The Second Strongest Man,” and “An Animal to the Memory.” What is more, Bezmozgis juxtaposes Mark's investigations into Choynski with vignettes of his grandmother's failing health. The back-and-forth quality of the narrative draws direct parallels between the famous Jewish boxer and Mark's own familial past, and in doing so underscores the tenacity of his Jewish heritage which corresponds to the fighter imagery that occurs elsewhere in the text.The same can be said of the final story, “Minyan,” where Mark recalls the frustrating attempts to find ten men in the synagogue located in his grandfather's B'nai Brith retirement home. The Orthodox seem perpetually stuck with only eight regular male attendees, and only the presence of Mark and his grandfather (who has just recently been accepted into the home) complete the minyan. Mark's presence at the services seems unusual at first, but as he reveals to the reader, “Most of the old Jews came because they were drawn by the nostalgia for ancient cadences. I came because I was drawn by the nostalgia for old Jews” (134). Whereas the building's regular attendees are connected to the more religious or traditional aspects of Judaism, the narrator is motivated by cultural, and largely humanistic, links to his past. On the one hand, this attitude recalls the emphasis on inherited cultural (as opposed to observant) Jewishness found earlier in the story cycle—the significance of the apple cake in “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist” (30)—yet at the same time it stands in stark contrast to the kind of ethnic ambivalence demonstrated by Mark's family while growing up. Much as is in the previous story, Mark is drawn to the various and diverse signifiers that defined his Jewish past, for example, the old men, the boxers, the community of Jews. This inclusive message is driven home in the last pages of the text, where the synagogue's gabbi refuses to turn away one of the home's residents just because others in the building believe him to be gay: “Homosexuals, murders, liars, and thieves—I take them all. Without them we would never have a minyan” (147). With these final words, Bezmozgis underscores Mark's (ironic) assimilation into the Jewish community and its ever-increasing significance throughout the text.Whereas the protagonist of Natasha and Other Stories evolves into a creature of shared culture, in Litman's The Last Chicken in America, community rests front and center, and from the very beginning the book's structure suggests an interwoven relationship between the individual and the Russian émigré community that surrounds her, albeit one that is not always wanted or always constructive. The twelve individual stories that compose the text are arranged in an alternating manner, where, for the most part, every other narrative focuses on Masha, the book's protagonist by default, and each of the remaining six concern the lives of other Jewish Russian émigrés who live in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood.8 Not only are all of the stories interlinked through narrative juxtaposition, but they are given a more novelistic cohesion through repetition of allusion. Characters and places that appear in one story, either Masha's or one of the others, are referenced again in one or more of the narratives that follow. Sometimes a figure briefly mentioned in one story functions as a protagonist in another. In this way, Litman creates what she (or her publisher) calls in the book's subtitle “A Novel in Stories,” giving the text a broader and more unified quality than even Bezmozgis's.9 More significantly, by interlinking her twelve stories in this manner—in other words, by creating a cycle narrative—Litman is able not only to relate a classical immigrant bildungsroman (where an individual arrives in America, negotiates the tensions between the Old World and the New, and grows through processes of assimilation and self-assertion) but to emphasize this narrative within a larger communal context. By doing so, the author reveals the heteroglossic and multifaceted interconnectivity underlying the American ethnic experience, or the American experience as a whole, which is analogous to the short-story cycle the reader engages.Taken entirely on their own, the six stories that make up Masha's narrative, while not as revealing as those of Bezmozgis, are nonetheless components of an immigrant bildungsroman where we see a young individual and his or her family struggle, develop, and accomplish over time.10 In the first story, “The Last Chicken in America,” Masha is a high school student who, along with her parents, has just recently arrived in Pittsburgh, having emigrated from Moscow. By the last installment of the book, both appropriately and ironically entitled “Home,” she has moved away to Boston, attends Harvard as a graduate student in Slavic languages and literature, and, at least on the surface, has escaped the stifling insularity she so closely associates with the Squirrel Hill émigré community. While the other four Masha stories provide glimpses of the protagonist at various times over the intervening years—in “Charity” she is a quasi-nanny for an upper-middle-class Jewish family; in “Russian Club” she becomes a member of her high school's Russian club with its visiting professor from her homeland; in “Peculiarities of the National Driving” she learns how to drive, having to navigate the roads while at the same time negotiating their family's economic concerns; and in “Among the Lilacs and the Girls,” now a student at the University of Pittsburgh, she and her father contend with her mother's debilitating depression11—it is the two framing stories that give the collection much of its cohesion. Inextricably linked in a variety of ways, they function as an essential framing device guiding the course of the text. Both stories introduce (or reintroduce) many of the characters who populate the various stories, both provide the themes that largely define the collection, and both establish the ambiguous tone surrounding the contemporary immigrant experience in America.One of the ways that Litman interconnects “The Last Chicken in America” and “Home” is by setting them within a similar milieu. Both take place with essentially the same Squirrel Hill émigré characters that define Masha's early life in America. Both of the Donetsk twins, flighty figures for whom Masha has little patience, play prominent roles in the two stories, as does Lariska, Masha's closest female friend. Furthermore, Lariska's relationship with Zhenechka effectively frames the text. In the first story, Lariska fantasizes about marrying him—“She is in love with an ‘old-timer,’ a mysterious distant cousin, Zhenechka” (14)—and the final story revolves around their impending marriage.12 Indeed, the topic of romantic relationships largely defines each story. Whereas “Home” is about the marriage of Lariska and Zhenechka, the title story concerns Masha's problematic relationship with Alick, another Russian émigré but one with more of the American experience under his belt. Both stories also directly establish the difficult place of Masha in relation to her community. In the first story, Masha admits to the reader, “I hate being in the middle” (17), and in the final narrative she broods over her situation vis-à-vis America. Not feeling entirely comfortable being back in Squirrel Hill, among all of her old Russian friends and neighbors, she nonetheless is uncertain about her inherited home: “I watched CNN, I ate out, I read American books. I'd quit my job and gone back to school, which was something most Americans admired. But I lacked their boldness and fluency, their flippant resistance to gloom. My father said I'd never be quite like them” (229).More importantly, both the first and last stories establish a theme