Coming to America

By SUSAN COMNINOS

THERE ARE JEWS IN MY HOUSE
By Lara Vapnyar
149 pages. Pantheon. $17.95.

Consider the Jewish coming-of-age tale recently popularized by Gary Shteyngart’s hipster-slacker novel The Russian Debutante's Handbook and Jonathan Safran Foer’s semi-magical look at Ukraine in Everything is Illuminated. In it, a Western boychik triumphs in Eastern Europe, where he bilks the benighted locals or forces anti-Semites to do a paradigm shift. Money is made, women are laid, and the former Soviet bloc is left a better—or at least chastened—place by the American-Jewish hero.

That fantasy is challenged in the first book by Russian-Jewish émigré writer Lara Vapnyar, There Are Jews in My House. A slim volume of six tales, it offers quiet prose about modest souls: Slavic Jews trying to stay afloat in 20th century Russia and Brooklyn.

Vapnyar, 32, left Moscow for Brooklyn in 1994. Yet most of her tales recall her hostile motherland, where Jews have faced systemic oppression, even violence. Having lived for 23 years in Russia, Vapnyar can be considered informed about the place—and her clearheaded tales about it to counterweigh the wish-filled bildungsromans about Eastern Europe penned by American-Jewish men.

Not her sex, Vapnyar says, but her Russian credentials distinguish her fiction from that of the Soviet émigré Shteyngart, who moved to the U.S. when he was seven, and the American-born Foer. “I went to college in Russia,” says Vapnyar, where she earned a master’s degree in Russian Literature. “I grew up reading Russian books: Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov. This is what makes my style and my writing so different—and not the fact that I am a woman.”

Bluntly, she adds, “I grew up reading more serious literature” than did Shteyngart or Foer—or even the rising Latvian-Jewish short story writer David Bezmozgis, who emigrated to Canada at 11 (and debuted in the New Yorker magazine shortly before Vapnyar).

Vapnyar's pointed style helps to make her stories memorable, even when her settings are banal. “Question for Vera” unfolds in a Soviet kindergarten, where a Jewish child is belittled for her Semitic looks. In turn, the child mocks a one-eyed doll: “Look at your eyes! Sorry, at your eye. Look how big and round it is. Do you think this is normal? No, it’s not.” A verdict follows: “You know what, Vera? There is a very good chance that you are Jewish too.”

From childhood on, Vapnyar’s Jews realize that there is little for them in Russia. Yet those lucky enough to leave it suffer new aches. In the fine story “Mistress,” Russians in America struggle with language, loneliness and loss—their troubles told by a boy whose home disintegrates under the stress of emigration, as his grandmother embraces hypochondria and his grandfather an affair.

Vapnyar’s stories set in the present show off her acuity and narrative flair, but she falters in her Holocaust-era title story. Meant to show Jews betrayed by a gentile in Ukraine, the tale sits atop a jerrybuilt Russia-of-the-mind, one composed of Soviet stereotypes (drunkenness and endless meals of potatoes) and, oddly, American brand names. Characters patronize a café called “Meat Patties,” where one buys a “coffee beverage.” And to its hiding place, a Jewish family takes a doll whose Teutonic looks and hard plastic body, with limbs of “some other, softer kind,” conjure up Barbie.

Clearly, Vapnyar is no Holocaust scholar. But does she need to be? Her modern-day stories bespeak a burgeoning talent. More, they almost assure her a place among noted Jewish émigré authors—those offering a real picture of Jews' lives in contemporary Russia and its former outrigger states.