A Better Place to Be Unhappy

Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

A BETTER PLACE TO BE UNHAPPY

Identity in Gary Shteyngart’s immigrant fiction

Paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in de Taal- Promotor: en Letterkunde: Nederlands – prof. dr. Philippe Codde August 2011 Engels” by Thomas Joos

Acknowledgments

In the acknowledgments of his latest novel, Gary Shteyngart says that “writing a book is real hard and lonely, let me tell you.” I don’t mean to steal his thunder, nor to underestimate the efforts required to write a novel comparable to his fiction, but writing a thesis on his books has been equally hard and lonely. Especially in the summertime. Let me tell you.

Therefore, I would like to thank a number of people for helping me out or reminding me, once in a while, that I was still alive.

First and foremost, my thanks go to my promotor prof. dr. Philippe Codde for his valuable feedback and for introducing me to Jewish American fiction in the first place.

Also, I want to thank my parents, my brother Dieter and sister Eveline for supporting me, knowingly or unknowingly, from this world or another, at times when my motivation reached rock bottom.

Finally, a big thank you to my closest friends, who made this 4-year trip at Ghent University definitely worthwile.

Thomas Joos Ghent, August 2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION...... 1

PART ONE ...... 7

I. GARY SHTEYNGART...... 7

II. THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE...... 11

1. Historical Overview ...... 11

2. 21 st -Century Jewish American Fiction...... 16

2.1 Postmemory ...... 18

2.2 Postmigration ...... 21

III. POSTMIGRATION AND IDENTITY...... 24

1. The Geography of the Planet: Immigration Patterns...... 24

2. The Geography of the Mind: Identity Politics ...... 27

3. Identity in Contemporary Jewish American Literature...... 29

PART TWO ...... 33

IV. IDENTITY PERMUTATIONS IN THE RUSSIAN DEBUTANTE’S HANDBOOK ..... 33

1. The Ambiguity of Jewish Identity...... 33

1.1 Shteyngart’s ethnic shtick ...... 33

1.2 The schlemiel as the tragic, ironic hero in exile ...... 38

2. National Identity and Multiculturalism in the USA...... 48

2.1 Dialectics of assimilation ...... 49

2.2 Irony and the immigrant experience ...... 51

2.3 Meta-criticism in the postmigration framework ...... 53

V. THE GLOBAL VILLAGE OF ABSURDISTAN ...... 57

1. The National Shtick ...... 58

2. Postmigration Identity Permutations...... 63

3. Political Implications...... 71

3.1 All war is socio-economic ...... 71

3.2 The ethnoreligious reflex ...... 74

VI. THE END OF IDENTITY IN SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY ...... 78

1. The Existential, Political and Cultural Crisis...... 79

2. The Struggle for Identity...... 82

2.1 Jewish identity ...... 82

2.2 Traumatic identity ...... 85

3. Postmigration as a Political Pastiche...... 87

4. Identity in Literature...... 91

FINAL COMMENTS ...... 96

WORKS CITED...... 101

INTRODUCTION

The Jewish American paradox

In 2006, Adam Rovner published an article in which he briefly evaluates the contemporary status and the recent history of the Jewish American novel and its reception.1 Central to his inspiring discussion is a paradox that opposes two conflicting socio-literary tendencies with regard to Jewish American literature. On the one hand, Rovner brings to mind the successful and thorough process of cultural assimilation in which Jewish immigrants have been involved over the course of the 20 th century “since Jewish immigration peaked in 1907.” 2 This process of assimilation has often been perceived as a threat to the survival of American Jewry and prompted a lot of panicky reactions. In 1984, Stephen J. Whitfield warned that “both as a percentage and as sheer numbers, American Jewry has been declining of late, a tendency that shows every sign of continuing.” 3 Similar concerns were also phrased in the controversial 1990 National Jewish Population Survey.4 Naturally, this evolution led many literary critics and scholars to believe that the Jewish American novel would decline accordingly. One of them was the prominent social and literary critic Irving Howe. Already in 1977, Howe claimed that “American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point. Insofar as this body of writing draws heavily from the immigrant experience, it must suffer a depletion of resources, a thinning out of materials and memories.” 5 Howe’s outlook is straightforward: the sociocultural position of American Jewry could only be more and more described in terms of (successful) assimilation and integration. Hence, literary representation of that specific Jewish American expierence was bound to disappear as well, or at least bound to disband in an ‘all-American’ corpus of mainstream literature. Howe was not the only critic who (prematurely) mourned the extinction of Jewish American fiction. Rovner points out that prominent scholars like Ruth Wisse and Leslie Fiedler “have been far les conciliatory than Howe” 6 in their predictions. Fiedler even decisively concluded that “the Jewish-American novel is over and done with, a part of history rather than a living literature.” 7

1 Adam Rovner, “So Easily Assimilated: The New Immigrant Chic.” AJS Review 30:2 (2006): 313 – 324 2 Rovner, 314 3 Stephen J. Whitfield, Voices of Jacob, Hands of Esau: Jews in American Life and Thought (Hamden: Archon Books, 1984), xi 4 Conclusions of the survey can be retrieved at http://www.jewishdatabank.org/NJPS1990.asp 5 Howe in Rovner, 315 6 Rovner, 315 7 Leslie Fiedler, Fiedler on the Roof, Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity (Boston: Godine, 1991), 117

Needless to say, history has proven Howe and his contemporaries at least partially wrong: the Jewish American novel is not past its high point. Even more, throughout the last two decades, it has managed to become a highly popular and burgeoning literary field in contemporary American writing. Derek Parker Royal elaborately disproves all attempts to finalize the Jewish American literary tradition in his 2004 article “Unfinalized Moments in Jewish American Narrative.” 8 He distinguishes a promising Jewish American literary revival taking shape from the 1990s onwards, as “the centrifugal spin of assimilation gives way to a more centripetal pull toward ethnic definition.”9 This renewed attention for Jewish identity and culture shows itself (a.o.) in the work of Allegra Goodman, Rebecca Goldstein and Michael Chabon. Other writers of this ‘new wave’, among which Art Spiegelman, Thane Rosenbaum, Eva Hoffman and Melvin Jules Bukiet, explicitly draw upon the Holocaust to assert Jewish identity and introduce the trauma-related matter of so-called “second-generation witnessing” to the Holocaust in literature. 10 The Holocaust also takes up an important role in the work of Jonathan Safran Foer, to whom Royal only briefly refers. Foer can best be considered a prominent exponent of yet another generation of Jewish American writers, along with, for instance, Nicole Krauss and Judy Budnitz. In their attempts to profile their Jewish identity and their ties to Jewish history, these third-generation writers saw themselves bound to resort to very untraditional and highly creative literary devices. Considering the huge popularity of writers like Art Spiegelman and Jonathan Safran Foer, who explicitly assert their Jewish American lineage, Irving Howe’s proclamations seem at least to be heavily exaggerated. Yet, Howe’s words are useful to us in another, indirect way, as they distinctly recall that the flowering of the Jewish American literary scene should not be taken for granted. Cultural critic Steve Stern, though one of many who have discredited Howe’s forecasts near the end of the century, refrained from questioning the authority of Irving Howe, “for the evidence still remains more in favor of burying Jewish American fiction than praising it.” 11 The observation that ‘the centrifugal spin of assimilation’ in American society is bound to inflict serious change upon literature remains logical and valid in its own right. Rovner repeats that claim and illustrates a paradox by opposing Howe’s findings to the recent Jewish American revival. Moreover, Rovner contours a new wave of Jewish American authors, which he mockingly calls the representatives of a “New Immigrant Chic”. In his critical article, Rovner focuses on

8 Derek Parker Royal, “Unfinalized Moments in Jewish American Narrative.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22:3 (2004): 1 – 11 9 Royal, 2 – 3 10 Royal 4 11 Stern in Royal, 3

three writers: Gary Shteyngart, Lara Vapnyar and David Bezmozgis. 12 Other authors who can be included in the literary wave are Michael Idov, Anya Ulinich, Gina Ochsner, Keith Gessen, Olga Grushin and Sana Krasikov. All of them are Russian emigrés, born in the seventies, and started publishing their novels and short stories since the turn of the century, roughly. In his attempts to explain the aforementioned paradox, Rovner especially aims at the most popular author of late, Gary Shteyngart, and accuses him (and, by extension, his ‘peers’) of light-heartedly playing the sentimental card and indulging in what Howe once called the “nostalgia for the nostalgia of other people.” 13 Widespread appreciation by the (Jewish) American public, Rovner argues, is no more than a desperate reflex to “claim a vicarious Jewish distinctiveness that only underscores the successful acculturation of earlier generations of Jews into the American mainstream.” 14 Donald Weber also closely observed the emergence of this Russian-Jewish-American literary wave and comes to very different conclusions in his enthusiastic paper called “Permutations of New-World Experiences Rejuvenate Jewish-American Literature.” 15 Weber rebuts the Howe doctrine as “dead wrong” 16 and praises the work of Shteyngart, Vapnyar and Bezmozgis as a “fascinating new chapter in a long tradition of Jewish immigrant writing.”17 Unlike Rovner, Weber regards the actual immigrant experience, the “struggle to decode an often bewildering, disorienting new environment,”18 as the creative foundation of this new fiction. In that sense, Weber admits, Howe was partially right still, as he “nevertheless understood the profound literary potential of the immigrant experience.” 19

Thesis objectives

In this thesis, I will zoom in on one particular writer of this wave of Russian emigré authors: Gary Shteyngart. I will discuss how Shteyngart’s fiction deals with its status of ‘Jewish American immigrant narrative’ and how it expresses some major sociocultural concerns of the 21st century in literature. The choice for Shteyngart is not proactively based on literary grounds, as if his body of fiction is supposed to be more suitable than that of any other of the aforementioned Jewish- Russian-American writers to tackle points of critical attention. Rather, the decision to concentrate

12 Rovner, 314 13 Rovner, 314 14 Rovner, 317 15 Donald Weber, “Permutations of New-World Experiences Rejuvenate Jewish-American Literature.” Chronicle of Higher Education 51:4 (2004), no pag. 16 Weber, no pag. 17 Weber, no pag. 18 Weber, no pag. 19 Weber, no pag.

on Gary Shteyngart has been prompted by extra-literary arguments; the widespread popular and critical appreciation of Shteyngart’s novels – as we will show later on – outshines the impact on the American literary scene of the other authors by far. Note, however, that is by no means the intention to appoint Gary Shteyngart as the ‘leader’ of the literary wave. Nor is it the intention to anthologize his work as ‘exemplary’. The inclusion of authors into this ‘group’ of writers is mainly legitimized through autobiographical correspondances and also through a preoccupation with a general literary topic, but there still are fundamental differences among several writers of the literary wave, ranging from literary form and style to setting and thematic accents. In order to bear this relative diversity in mind, I will occasionally refer to authors other than Shteyngart in order to mark relevant similarities or differences.

The starting point of this thesis is what I will refer to as the Jewish American paradox: the emergence of a Jewish American literary revival despite Howe’s valid observation that increasing assimilation cannot remain without repercussions. The paradox is nicely formulated by Leslie Fiedler in one of his essays:

Many critics have for many years now been remarking (some in anger and sorrow, some – including me – with detached amusement) the paradoxical fact that the rise of Jewish-American literature to a dominant position in the culture of the modern world occured at a moment when the Jewishness of the Jewish-American community had become problematical, and indeed its very existence was being threatened by intermarriage, assimilation, and cultural attrition. 20

In what follows, I will investigate how Shteyngart’s fiction offers possible solutions to the Jewish American paradox and how it renews the genre of Jewish American fiction. Basically, in this thesis, I will argue that Shteyngart does not reinvigorate Jewish American literature simply by falling back on the immigrant experience and representing the immigration patterns that have emerged from the end of the 20 th century onwards. Instead, Shteyngart deconstructs the immigrant experience by staging remigration and fictitious settings in unrealistic adventure stories. By avoiding a clear-cut Old World to New World immigration pattern in his stories, Shteyngart also avoids the sociocultural circumstances that define it, such as the waning of a distinct Jewish identity in America. Shteyngart’s fiction should be considered part of a larger postmodern literary wave that is characterized by a poetical focus on identity: identity has

20 Fiedler, 59

become the self-conscious subject of Shteyngart’s novels, so much so that the immigrant experience is completely stripped of its spatiotemporal parameters. What remains, the complex Jewish-American-Russian identity compound, is Shteyngart’s first concern. The setting or the actions in his stories serve as the externalization of the complicated identity permutations of his protagonists, who are, in a way, pinnacles of the “mental immigrant.” Moreover, I argue that Shteyngart’s identity-based fiction not only deals with the personal identity permutations of the immigrant protagonist, but also comments on global identity permutations, such as the merging of identities and mentalities and the fading of former (Cold-War era) ideological, political, economic and cultural oppositions in the globalized world. These political implications give Shteyngart’s fiction an extra dimension and prove that it is more than just a game of identities. So, basically, I contend that Shteyngart’s identity-based immigrant fiction reinvigorates Jewish American fiction in two ways. First, by representing the unique hyphenated identity of the Jewish-American-Russian immigrant in a performative way that shows how ethnic, national and personal identity are inextricably intertwined. Whereas previous generations of (Jewish American) immigrant fiction dealt with the need or the inability to assimilate to the new homeland, Shteyngart’s cosmopolitan immigrant fiction deals with the need or inability to assimilate to the changing world as a whole. Second, Shteyngart’s fiction renews Jewish American literature by projecting the identity permutations of the immigrant on the globalized world. Not only Shteyngart’s protagonists have to cope with a hyperhyphenated identity, the 21 st -century world has to do so as well. Shteyngart aptly inserts these political implications in his work, for instance, by focusing on the role of ethnoreligious revivalism in 21 st -century world politics (cf. Absurdistan ) or by analyzing American society from a distinct Jewish-American-Russian perspective (cf. Super Sad True Love Story ). In this way, Shteyngart renews the relevance of Jewish American literature – the relevance that Howe said would vanish.

Structure and methodology

This thesis consists of two major parts. In the first part, I set up a theoretical framework so as to define the appropriate approach to Shteyngart’s literature. First I present a general outline of Gary Shteyngart’s life and work. Then, in the second chapter, I discuss the status of the immigrant experience in Jewish American fiction. I start with a selective historical overview of Jewish American fiction so as to illustrate the fluctuating role of the immigrant experience over

the years and centuries. After that, I will focus on 21 st -century Jewish American fiction and its ambiguous relation to Jewish identity. Before defining the nature of the immigrant experience in Shteyngart’s work, I pass by the so-called postmemory fiction of Jonathan Safran Foer (and others) in order to establish some poetical postmodern similarities with Shteyngart. In analogy with the term ‘postmemory’, I refer to the significance of the immigrant experience in Shteyngart’s fiction as ‘postmigration’. The third chapter, finally, deals with identity in postmigration. I elaborate on the postmigration concept that I have introduced in the previous chapter and I explain how postmigration can be distinguished from the immigrant experience in ‘traditional’ immigrant narratives by means of the programmatical importance its identity politics. Also, I compare these findings to a theoretical assessment of identity in contemporary Jewish American fiction in general. The second part of this thesis is devoted to a close reading of Shteyngart’s work. In this part, I will confront the theoretical observations and conclusions from the first part with detailed textual evidence from Shteyngart’s novels. The fourth chapter deals with Jewish immigrant identity in Shteyngart’s debut The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . I illustrate how Rovner’s accusations towards Shteyngart can be discredited, or at least counterbalanced, by applying the postmigration concept to the novel. Also, I examine how Shteyngart’s novel deals with matters of assimilation and multiculturalism. In the fifth chapter, I discuss Absurdistan . The political implications in the novel will be central to my analysis, but matters of Jewish identity will also prove interesting in this respect. The sixth chapter, finally, is about Shteyngart’s latest novel Super Sad True Love Story . The impact of literature on identity in the novel as well as Shteyngart’s political project will be reconstructed here. Although I call the second part of this thesis the ‘close reading’ part, that does not mean that I will not bring up any theoretical elements in my analysis of Shteyngart’s novels. The theoretical framework in the first part is meant to define and explain the theoretical concept that I call postmigration, but additional theoretical elements or approaches that are not essential to postmigration per se , I will bring up in the course of the second part. Mostly, these additional theories are only useful if applied directly to (one of) the primary sources. This methodology might be a bit unorthodox, but it is functional, and I believe that it serves my purposes the best.

PART ONE - theoretical framework -

I. GARY SHTEYNGART

[ This chapter gives a short outline of Gary Shteyngart’s life and work. ]

Gary Shteyngart (né Igor Shteyngart) was born in 1972 in Leningrad (USSR). Shteyngart thinks of his childhood as typically Soviet. His father was a technical engineer and his mother a pianist. The Jewish Shteyngart family lived in a square in Leningrad (now St-Petersburg or as Shteyngart himself calls it: “St Leningrad”) that was landmarked by a big statue of Lenin. The statue of the First Comrade impressed Igor, who had wild fantasies about serving in the famous Red Army. Unfortunately, the life in the former Soviet Union had less heroic effects on Igor as well: as a result of the heavily polluted Soviet air, Igor suffered from asthma and was bed-ridden most of the time. To kill time, he turned to reading and writing. He wrote his first ‘book’ when he was five years old. Shteyngart later described it as a political satire, featuring Lenin embarking on a journey with a magical goose. 21 In 1980, when Igor was seven years old, The Shteyngarts moved to the United States. Father Shteyngart was tired of being a second-class citizen in antisemitic Soviet Russia and the détente episode of the Cold War offered a good opportunity to emigrate to the USA. However, the transition did not prove easy for Igor (now Gary). His parents would not allow English to be spoken at home and also television remained taboo for some time. Gary could not shed his thick Russian accent before the age of fourteen. As a boy, he attented a fancy and conservative Hebrew school, where he did not really fit in with his fellow-pupils. Gary was bullied because of his strange roots and his shabby, poor-looking appearance. The daily humiliations led Shteyngart to recall later on in life that “when I was eight or nine years old, nothing was worse than being a Russian.” The strict, oppressive climate in Hebrew school and the fanatic religious education

21 Ed Pilkington, “Russian revolution.” (Interview in The Guardian, 6-29-2007): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/29/usa.edpilkington

changed Shteyngart’s view on religion for good. At the time, he managed to cope with his maladjustment by writing satirical stories on the Torah. In early adult life, Shteyngart worked for the New York Association for New Arrivals (NYANA) 22 , a non-profit agency that assisted immigrants of all nationalities in their integration in American society. Shteyngart studied politics at Oberlin College (Ohio) and Creative Writing at Hunter College (New York). 23

Shteyngart’s first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook 24 , was published in 2002. It is set in the fictitious European city ‘Prava’, which shares suspisciously many characteristics with the city of Prague in the Czech Republic. Shteyngart actually traveled to Prague while still in college and used his stay in the former Eastern Bloc as a source of inspiration for The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . While writing the book, Shteyngart realized that “there wasn’t one damn book by anyone of my generation of Soviet immigrants. That was shocking to me. Every other immigrant group was represented: Korean-Americans, Indians, Dominicans, you name it.” 25 Yet, it took more than five years to get the apparently long-awaited novel published, and then even ‘by accident’, behind his back, because Shteyngart “was afraid of what [his] parents would think.”26 By filling the Jewish-American-Russian literary void, anyway, Shteyngart surely obtained large approval by critics and readers alike. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction 2003 and the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and helped put Gary Shteyngart on the map as a new, fresh voice in the American literary scene. The Russian Debutante’s Handbook features protagonist Vladimir Girshkin, a 25-year old immigrant who works for the Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society in New York. Girshkin is painfully conscious of his failure in life, love, work and what else more. His dull, routine-based existence is suddenly interrupted when he meets Alexander Rybakov, a psychotic elderly Russian immigrant applying for an American passport. After a series of unsuccessful attempts to grasp the opportunities that the USA has to offer and to make something of his life, Girshkin embarks on a frantic journey to Prava, where he is supposed to assist Rybakov’s son, ‘the Groundhog’, and his criminal organisation in defrauding the fancy American expatriate community. While doing so, he meets a couple of fellow-expats who turn his views on himself, Jewry, America and so much more topsyturvy.

22 The NYANA was closed in the summer of 2008; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Association_for_New_Americans 23 Jacques Berlinerblau (public interview with Gary Shteyngart at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 1-29- 2008: http://pjc.georgetown.edu/77709.html 24 Gary Shteyngart, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. 2002 (London: Bloomsbury, 2003). In footnotes henceforth abbreviated as RDH . 25 Pilkington 26 Berlinerblau, 15

Three years later, Shteyngart’s second novel appears, Absurdistan 27 (2006). The New York Times Book Review issued a glowing review, praising Sheyngarts talent for writing a “novel [that] is so immodestly vigorous, so burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence.”28 In a way, Absurdistan further explores some major themes that were already ingrained in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . Addressing the reader in Absurdistan is Misha Vainberg, a young Russian from Saint Petersburg with a degree in multicultural studies from the USA, and a great admirer of everything that America stands for – including obesity, sexist rap music and consumerism. After the assassination of his oligarchic, super rich father, Misha flees to the fictitious oil-rich nation of Absurdistan, ‘the Norway of the Caspian’, where he gets entangled in a hazy civil war between two ethnic communities (the Sevo and the Svanï). Before he knows, he finds himself appointed Minister of Multicultural Affairs, trying to strengthen ties with Israel. The dubious interference of the American multinational Halliburton only adds up to the absurdity of the goings-on. Eventually, Misha is forced to leave the destructed Absurdistan capital and happily takes refuge among Mountain Jews.

Shteyngart’s third and most recent novel, Super Sad True Love Story 29 (2010), has a quite different perspective than its two predecessors and can be considered the most ‘political’ work of fiction of the three. Set in an eery, undetermined future, and almost entirely set in America, the novel parts with the semi-exoctic Eastern Bloc atmosphere that dominated Shteyngart’s earlier works. The world of Super Sad True Love Story is one of a dystopian society where all the vices of 21 st - century western life are nightmarishly extrapolated. The hegemony of social media and retail, the sickly celebration of youth, immortality and everything new, the radical repudiation of old forms of living (including books) are the symptoms of an America that is on the very brink of economic and social collapse. While the Chinese are knocking at the gates, the totalitarian Bipartisan government declares martial law in order to eliminate political dissidents and to crush riots. Amidst this 1984-ish hell-on-earth, the unremarkable Leonard ‘Lenny’ Abramov tries to connect sincerely with the love of his life, the much younger Korean-American Eunice Park, in vain. The chapters of Super Sad True Love Story alternate between Eunice’s e-mail correspondence and Leonard’s diary entries.

27 Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan . 2006 (London: Granta Books, 2008) In footnotes henceforth abbreviated as ABS . 28 Walter Kirn, “Russian Unorthodox.” (Review in The New York Times, 4-30-2006): http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/books/review/30kirn.html?ref=garyshteyngart 29 Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story . 2010 (New York: Random House, 2010). In footnotes henceforth abbreviated as SSTLS .

Critical reception of Super Sad True Love Story was even more impressive than of Shteyngart’s previous novels: it won the Salon Book Award for Fiction 2010 and the influential New York Times proved itself yet again an enthusiastic admirer and faithful marketing ally of “Mr. Shteyngart [who] gives us his most powerful and heartfelt novel yet.” 30 : Super Sad True Love Story was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a New York Times bestseller.

The three novels so far have very much established the personal popularity and critical standing of Gary Shteyngart. The New Yorker magazine added him to the honorary ‘20 under 40’ list, which includes 20 writers younger than 40 who “capture the inventiveness and the vitality of contemporary American fiction.”31 Shteyngart’s name stands alongside renowned co-writers like Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Safran Foer and David Bezmozgis. Yet, not all critical attention for Shteyngart has been entirely positive. For instance, in her review of Shteyngart’s debut, Elena Lappin remarks that “it’s a pity he can’t resist saying absolutely everything he can think of on any given theme.” 32 Indeed, especially in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan , Shteyngart’s way of confronting his topics is rather chaotic and now and then overloaded. Still, one can perhaps discern a programmatic intention in that chaos, as Shteyngart has a penchant for frantic and uncontrollable protagonists.

Currently, Gary Shteyngart lives in the traditionally Jewish Lower East Side of Manhattan and teaches literature and writing as an Assisant Professor at Columbia University. 33

30 Michiko Kakutani, “Love Found Amid Ruins of Empire.” (Review in The New York Times, 7-26-2010): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/books/27book.html?ref=garyshteyngart 31 The list: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/20-under-40/writers-q-and-a 32 Elena Lappin, “An American in Prava.” (Review in The Guardian, 14-6-2003): http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/jun/14/featuresreviews.guardianreview24 33 Columbia University website: http://arts.columbia.edu/faculty/gary-shteyngart

II. THE IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE IN JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

[ In this chapter, I will reflect on how Shteyngart’s fiction fits in and at the same time adapts the Jewish American literary tradition by sketching a selective and succinct historical outline of the genre. Special attention will be drawn towards the fluctuating role of the Jewish American immigrant experience in literature. The concept of postmigration in literature makes up the conclusion of this transhistorical analysis. ]

1. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

In the introduction, I have already brought up what is usually referred to as the ‘Howe doctrine’. According to Irving Howe, who made his forecast in the seventies of the previous century, Jewish American literature will lose its value and its right to exist in the decades to come, because the ongoing assimilation of the Jewish community in the mainstream American society will absorb all cultural Jewish distinctiveness that formerly informed Jewish American literature. Adam Rovner, who uses the Howe doctrine as a point of departure for his assessment of Shteyngart and the ‘New Immigrant Chic’, nuances Howe’s claim and remarks that Howe “was decidedly un doctrinaire about his assertion.”34 Despite this gratuitous hope that Jewish American literature might perhaps have a future somehow , Rovner admits that Howe has made himself quite clear: “[T]he end of immigration meant the end of [literary] creativity.” 35 Controversial though it may be, Howe’s outlook does not need to surprise anyone, considering that it comes from the author who won the National Book Award for World of Our Fathers 36 . Howe’s magnum opus is an ambitious cultural-historical chronicle of the East European Ashkenazi Jews that settled in America from the 1880s onwards. A large part of Howe’s attention is devoted to how the immigrant population dealt with their Jewish identity in the ghettos of the

34 Rovner, 315 35 Rovner, 315 36 Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers . 1976 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976)

New World. Howe illustrates how Jewish American literary pioneers such as Anzia Yezierska, Mary Antin and, later on, Henry Roth heavily draw upon the troublesome process of assimilation in their stories. Abraham Cahan, who also played an important social and political role in the New York Jewish ghetto 37 , is prominently staged by Howe as the ultimate representative of the first generation of Jewish American writers. Howe holds that “no Yiddish writer was as acute as he in grasping the desires of the Jews for spiritual gratification, material easement, and a way of life that might yoke the two.” 38 Cahan’s novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto 39 aptly illustrates the realist (or almost naturalist) approach to the burdensome immigrant experience among Jewish American storytellers at the time. In her essay “Of Crucibles and Grandfathers: the East European Immigrants,”40 Priscilla Wald stresses the centrality of the essentially isolated immigrant experience in this story, as Yekl’s “vision of what [Americanization] means is filtered comically, even pathetically, through the prism of Yiddish New York.”41 In order to accomplish his New World goals, the immigrant Yekl (Jake) leaves his hopelessly traditional Old World wife and falls in love with another immigrant woman from the ghetto, whose longer stay in America has bestowed a faint air of Americanness on her. However, Yekl/Jake ends up disillusioned. By marrying a somewhat Americanized ghetto Jew, and not a ‘native’ American, Yekl is trapped in his biased conception of assimilation. Wald holds that, from Cahan’s perspective, “Americanization does not mean complete incorporation into the ‘homogeneous whole’ of America.” 42 All contact with New World attitudes and values, as well as the assertion or renunciation of Old World ethnicity, are restricted within the confines of the (ghetto) immigrant experience, which makes assimilation much harder. Furthermore, Wald registers a strict mental separation between the Old and the New world in this first stage of Jewish American literature, and even an intense progressive desire to cast off one’s Old World memories and mentality completely. We can discern this, for example, in Cahan’s radical naming policy in Yekl : “Three years had intervened since he had first set foot on American soil, and the thought of ever having been a Yekl would bring to Jake’s lips a smile

37 Cahan was a prominent personality in the American labor movement and an influential journalist for many Yiddish newspapers and magazines. 38 Howe, 525 39 Abraham Cahan, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto . 1896. Ed. Bernard. G. Richards (New York: Dover Publications, 1970) 40 Priscilla Wald, “Of Crubicles and Grandfathers: The East European Immigrants,” The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature , eds. Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 50 – 69. 41 Wald, 59 42 Wald, 59

of patronizing commiseration for his former self.” 43 The renaming of himself, his wife and his son is a symbolic sign of the radical, irreversible rupture between Old and New. The denial of and the hate for the Past is also poignantly symbolized through Jake’s growing hate for his first ‘greenhorn’ wife. Moreover, these concerns are even explicitly articulated in the aspirations of the immigrant writers themselves. Wald contends that Mary Antin proclaims “the death of an earlier, Russian-Jewish, self and her remaking as an American.” 44 Indeed, in the introduction to her autobiography The Promised Land , Antin says: “I long to forget. [...] I want now to be of to-day. It is painful to be consciously of two worlds. The Wandering Jew in me seeks forgetfulness.” 45

When Howe talks about a “depletion of sources [and] a thinning out of materials and memories,”46 we can rightfully presume that he considers the immigrant experience – as authentically depicted in World of Our Fathers – the foundation of those sources, materials and memories. From that point of view, one can imagine that, in the decades preceding his (in)famous statements, Howe already discerned literary tendencies that informed them.47 Right after the Second World War, a new wave of 2 nd generation Jewish American writers stepped forward, among which Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth. Their stories offered a very different perspective on Jewish American life than the pre-war ‘ghetto’ literature. Insofar as we can conceive of the ‘immigrant experience’ as the transition from Old World traditions to New World opportunities (or the lack thereof), we can assume that Bellow, Malamud and Roth barely touch upon the immigrant experience to give their fiction a Jewish (American) orientation. Ruth Wisse (who, like Howe, claimed to witness the end of Jewish American literature in the mid-seventies 48 ) confirms that. In her article “Jewish American Renaissance,” 49 she specifically identifies Saul Bellow, one of the most celebrated American writers of the previous century 50 , as the writer who ushered Jewish American literature in the post-war era renaissance. According to Wisse,

it was he who demonstrated how a Jewish voice could speak for an integrated America. With Bellow, Jewishness moved in from the immigrant margins to

43 Cahan, 12 44 Wald, 53 45 Antin in Wald, 53 46 Howe in Rovner, 315 47 Note that I am by no means questioning the intrinsically literary qualities of the works and writers to come. I merely point out how a dinstinctly Jewish orientation is (or is not) displayed in literature. 48 Rovner, 315 49 Ruth Wisse, “Jewish American Renaissance,” The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature , eds. Hana Wirth- Nesher and Michael P. Kramer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 190 – 211 50 Saul Bellow has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, the National Medal of Arts and he has won the National Book Award three times.

become a new form of American regionalism. [...] Bellow [...] naturalized the immigrant voice: the American novel came to seem freshly authentic when it spoke in the voice of one of its discernible minorities. 51

This significant shift from ‘immigrant’ to ‘member of an American cultural minority’ can also be observed in the early work of Philip Roth. The novella and the short stories in Roth’s debut Goodbye, Columbus 52 illustrate that the process of Americanization and assimilation is a circumstantial plot element rather than a literary theme in its own right. For instance, in the title story, the young Neil Klugman (an intelligent college student who lives in a downtown working class neighbourhood) falls in love with Brenda Patimkin (a girl from a wealthy middle class family living in the suburbs). Their summertime relationship eventually breaks off because they do not seem able to fully connect with each other. Unlike in Cahan’s Yekl , this social estrangement has not much to do with varying degrees of assimilation in American society. Neil does not think of himself as ‘less American’ and nor does Brenda. Both young, secularly Jewish, native-born Americans, they are not hindered by the challenges of the immigrant experience. Instead, all barriers between Neil and Brenda (and between their respective milieus) are described in socio- economic terms. The class difference is the central point of conflict in the story and stirs intense emotions with Neil, who is not accustomed to the Patimkin’s materialistic suburb lifestyle. In her article on identity in the story, Helge N. Nilsen 53 portrays the Patimkin’s way of living aptly: “They are affluent, but crudely materialistic and snobbish, devoted to appearances, material wealth, social postition and athletic prowess.”54 The observation that Goodbye, Columbus in the first place displays the impact of socio-economic class differences, and not of assimilation in American society, is proved best by the role of Jewish religion in the story. Mrs. Patimkin is an active member of Hadassah, a Jewish volunteer women’s organization. In a brief and uneasy conversation with Neil, she questions him about his commitment to synagogues and his communal ties (orthodox, conservative, reformed, ...). 55 Neil, unacqainted with all that religious high society, feels indifferent to the matter and blunders by proclaiming: “I’m just Jewish.” 56 This scene suggest that the shared ethno-religious heritage of Neil and the Patimkins – Judaism – only serves to underscore the typically American socio-economic oppostitions (instead of counterbalancing them). Likewise, in the short story “Defender of the Faith,” Roth mocks the

51 Wisse, “Renaissance,”205 52 Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories . 1959. (London: Corgi, 1974) 53 Helge N. Nilsen, “Love and Identity: Neil Klugman’s Quest in Goodbye, Columbus. ” English Studies 68:1 (1987): 79 – 88. 54 Nilsen, 79 55 Roth, Goodbye, Columbus , 61 - 63 56 Roth, Goodbye, Columbus , 62

insincerity of American Jews who try to abuse their Jewishness in order to gain favors or other socio-economic advantages. Yet, to assume that the distinctly Jewish “sediment of felt life,”57 in Howe’s words, is already dried out in the work of Roth and his Jewish American contemporaries would be a big exaggeration. These authors were given the chance to recuperate their Jewish identity in fiction, as they had a contingent of global, post-World War II issues of Jewish specificity at their disposal: the Holocaust and its traumatic aftereffects; the ensuing emigration wave to America; the perserverance of anti-semitic sentiments in America and Europe; the reactionary upsurge of religious orthodoxy and extremism; the foundation of Israel as a nationstate; the growing zionist lobby in America; ... Those are all themes that penetrated into the fiction of most Jewish American writers at the time. A remarkable story that deals with the majority of the themes mentioned is Roth’s slightly mystic “Eli, the Fanatic,” in which an assimilated middle class community in the suburb Woodenton feels threatened by a new ultra-orthodox yeshiva of Holocaust survivors in the neighbourhood. They are afraid that the peaceful co-existence with the Protestant community will be jeopardized because of the newly arrived fanatics. Eli Peck, a Jewish Woondenton inhabitant, gets obsessed with the ultra-othodox Jews and, in the end, succumbs to them. The clash between Old World and New World is clearly foregrounded here. Still, rather than presenting the story as the immigrant experience of the ultra-orthodox yeshiva Jews, Roth chooses to focus on the assimilated Jewish community and their socio- economic aspirations. So even the contemporary issues that grant the literature its particularly Jewish identity are embedded in an American cognitive framework, as it were. Morris Dickstein 58 notices practically the same hierarchy in the work of post-war Jewish American authors: “Yet when immigrants did appear in their work [...] they were neither social beings defined by their historical community nor fully individualized characters pursuing a personal destiny. In tune with the existential mood of the moment, they were transformed into living metaphors, bearing the whole form of the human condition.” 59 In his article “Roth and Ethnic Identity,” 60 literary critic Timothy Parrish, specialized in Roth’s work, rightfully remarks that “Roth exemplifies a cultural pattern endemic to post-World War II American writing: the more ethnic his work seems, the more American it becomes.”61 Parrish thus echos Wisse’s evaluation of Bellow’s ethnic voice.

57 Howe in Weber, no pag. 58 Morris Dickstein, “Questions of Identity: The New World of the Immigrant Writer,” The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature , ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 110 – 132 59 Dickstein, 111 60 Timothy Parrish, “Roth and Ethnic Identity,” The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth , ed. Timothy Parrish (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 127 – 141 61 Parrish, 138

This paradox led Wisse to conclude that “the Jewish intellectual and literary cohort of the 1940s and 1950s introduced the hyphen into American letters.” 62

Overseeing the significant changes that Jewish American literature went through after the war, one can understand how they fueled Howe’s pessimism when he made predictions about the genre in 1977. As Wisse and Parrish have concluded, the dominance of Americanness in the works of fiction was already apparent in the 1950s and ‘new’ Jewish topics often served to stress the definitive assimilation of the protagonists. In a way, Goodbye, Columbus foreshadowed the future of Jewish American literature: an overt emphasis on the American topos of socio-economic status and achievement and the lack of a sincerely Jewish identity as a realistic alternative to the absorptive powers of the all-American society. Moreover, the major literary personalities themselves such as Saul Below, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth “frequently chafed at being considered Jewish writers and preferred to assert the Americanness of their novels,” Rovner claims. Add all that to a number of long-term historical evolutions in the second half of the 20 th century – the evaporation of collective Holocaust memories; the increasing unlikeliness of a massive emigration to Israel and the waning of a global Judaist cause; the ever continuing process of assimilation – and one can wonder how Jewish American literature was supposed to overcome the aforementioned challenges and renew itself as a distinguishable genre.

2. 21 st -CENTURY JEWISH AMERICAN FICTION

Less than thirty years after Howe’s critical momentum, Gary Shteyngart emerges on the literary scene as one of the most recent American writers that persist in (re)affirming the tradition of Jewish American literature. Shteyngart’s fiction is just the latest in line that finds ways to assert a Jewish identity. Basically, Shteyngart falls back on the archetypical core of Jewish American literature – the immigrant experience – to counter the unfavorable sociocultural circumstances implied in the Howe doctrine. As briefly mentioned in the introduction of this thesis, critic Donald Weber praises Gary Shteyngart, along with Lara Vapnyar and David Bezmozgis, for their successful attempts to secure the future of Jewish American literature. Weber rebuts the Howe doctrine, because “in the past few years we have witnessed a Jewish literary flowering by a rising generation of writers who have made [...] ‘their Jewish fantasies, feelings, and experiences absolutely central to their

62 Wisse, “Renaissance,” 208

work.’” 63 In analogy with Royal’s observation that “[t]he centrifugal spin of assimilation gives way to a more centripetal pull toward ethnic definition” 64 in a context of post-immigrant and post- assimilationist experience, Weber too witnesses “the unexpected return to the marrow of Jewishness that has come to mark the beginning of a new century.”65 Moreover, Weber sees reasons to include Shteyngart in a particular ‘subwave’ of this literary revival because he performs the return to the marrow of Jewishness in an innovative way. Instead of merely drawing upon post-Holocaust or post-assimilationist experiences, Shteyngart’s fiction is rooted in the immigrant experience: “[Shteyngart] transcribe[s] in startling new ways the immigrant families’ ordeal of transition, the familiar struggle to decode an often bewildering, disorienting new environment.” 66 Yet, when juxtaposing Shteyngart’s immigrant fiction to its precursor of a century ago (the works of Abraham Cahan and other East European Jewish pioneers, cf. supra) one can clearly see that Shteyngart fills in the concept of ‘immigrant experience’ in quite an innovative way; or, as Weber subtly puts it, that Shteyngart and other new Jewish immigrant writers “are in creative dialogue with the traditions of Jewish immigrant literature even as they transform our expectations.”67 Weber refers to Shteyngart’s debut The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , in which the (or better: ‘an’) immigrant experience is explicitly borne out. In the story, immigrant Vladimir Girshkin goes back to Eastern Europe to seek redemption there, as his life in America offers no more opportunities for less successful people like him. The biggest part of the story is set in Eastern Europe, and not in America. Weber celebrates how Shteyngart “liberates the American immigrant story, reversing the canonical narrative’s Old World to New World journey of rebirth and transformation.” 68 He thinks that Shteyngart succeeded very well in his literary re- interpretation and calls his work “a fascinating new chapter in a long tradition of Jewish immigrant writing.”69 Weber remarks that, ironically, this new literary wave in a way justifies the elemental sociological-aesthetic assumptions on which the Howe doctrine is based. Indeed, Howe identified “the immigrant experience as the energizing core of Jewish American literature,”70 as Weber reminds us, and Shteyngart seems to prove Howe right. So despite the fact that Howe’s

63 Weber, “Permutations,” no pag. 64 Royal, 2 – 3 65 Weber, “Permutations,” no pag. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid.

prediction turned out wrong factually in the eyes of Weber, he still approves of the underlying vision that stresses “the profound literary potential of the immigrant experience.”71

2.1 Postmemory

In order to examine how Shteyngart rehashes the immigrant experience in his work precisely, it might prove interesting to look at some other major works of Jewish American fiction of the 21 st century first. Though not really similar in their thematic and stylistic scope, the works of Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss and Judy Budnitz provide a good opportunity to identify some generational literary strategies that apply to the works of Shteyngart as well.

Basically, the work of Foer and Krauss can best be analyzed by means of the concept ‘postmemory’. In her article “The Generation of Postmemory,”72 Marianne Hirsch gives an extensive account of the psychological and artistic implications of the concept and offers the following non-restrictive definition: “Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”73 Referring to the Holocaust as traumatic experience, Hirsch illustrates how the osmosis between history and memory gives rise to hybrid narratives such as Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus 74 . From Hirsch’s point of view, the terms ‘history’ and ‘memory’, however, have undergone a significant transformation. The meaning of ‘memory’ is heavily mutated under influence of the poignant prefix ‘post’ and must not be understood literally, as “postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation.” 75 ‘Post’ not only suggests a temporal distance, but also an epistemological distance. In essence, postmemory balances on a generational (and historical) distance on the one hand and a very profound personal/familial connection with the trauma on the other. The essential ‘postness’ of the traumatic experience is a result of the “stories, images and behaviors among which [the inheritors of the trauma] grew up” 76 and forces them to come to grips with that

71 Ibid. 72 Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29:1 (2008): 103 – 128 73 Hirsch, 103 74 Art Spiegelman, Maus . 1996. (London: Penguin Books, 2003) 75 Hirsch, 107 76 Hirsch, 106

experience artistically in a way that counterbalances the lack of first-hand knowledge of the traumatic events. Instead of reconstructing the past through recollection, the postmemorial artist constructs a past through creative imagination because the ‘real’, historical past is no longer accessible (enough). Consequently, the role of history, as we traditionally know it, is limited. Historical sources – such as written documents or witness testimonies – are not the absolute foundation of postmemorial writing. Rather, they provide an incentive or need that kindles the creative postmemorial invention. The unreliability of sources – or the lack of context to understand them properly – is a major obstacle to the post-generations that visibly appears in and gives shape to postmemorial fiction. Hirsch draws upon 2 nd generation “survivors” of the Holocaust to explain the notion of ‘postmemory’ in literature, but the concept found its way also, and perhaps even more, in 3 rd generation stories. Philippe Codde shows how postmemory heavily informs the novels of 3 rd generation writers like Foer, Krauss and Budnitz. 77 Foer’s debut novel Everything Is Illuminated 78 clearly shows the preoccupation with the identity of the 3 rd generation Holocaust survivor. The novel alternates between an account of Jonathan’s search for the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II (and, by extension, for traces of his own roots in Eastern Europe) and an imaginative reconstruction of life in the shtetl where his grandfather lived. Jonathan’s need to give the past a place and the inaccessibility of that past are central to the novel and generate a flow of layered stories that tend to fill an existential void with words. Nicole Krauss’ novel The History Of Love 79 revolves around the same idea. In the story, the origins of a pre-World War II manuscript are tracked down, but the complicated course of history offers huge challenges. In Judy Budnitz’s novel If I Told You Once 80 , finally, four generations of women tell about their memories of a range of traumatic events, including pogroms. The women cover up their traumas by distorting their experiences in fabulated storytelling. Codde observes that Foer, Krauss and Budnitz deploy a shared set of literary devices that can be considered characteristic of this kind of 3 rd generation fiction, and that are also more widely dispersed throughout postmodern literature. Mediation is one of them: the novels are scattered with stories and framed stories which offer several versions of the same event, resist closure, layer the narration and even create a metafictional dimension. A nice example is the manuscript in The History Of Love by Nicole Krauss. The novel tracks down the peregrinations of the manuscript in various forms, over more than 60 years. In the end, the highly mediated

77 General information retrieved from Professor Philippe Codde’s course ‘Contemporary American Literature’, taught at Ghent University (fall 2010). 78 Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated . 2002. (London: Penguin Books, 2003) 79 Nicole Krauss, The History of Love . 2005. (London: Penguin Books, 2006) 80 Judy Budnitz, If I Told You Once . 1999. (New York: Picador, 2010)

manuscript reaches its original creator again. The mediated form of the manuscript is directly represented by the mediated form of the novel itself (wich has the same name as the manuscript). Codde remarks in this respect that “Krauss presents [the story] via interweaving and fragmentary strands of narrative that have vertiginous and bewildering effects on the reader.” 81 Intertextuality is another (typically postmodern) recurring motif in the postmemory novels. Intertextual references to myth and fairy tale give postmemorial inventiveness a boost and make up for a lack of coherence in the snaps of factual history that reach the protagonists from the past. Codde demonstrates how Budnitz’s novel If I Told You Once relies on the narrative pattern of fairy tales to represent traumatic history, stating that “the great-grandmother is indeed telling her great- granddaughter a fairy tale, but at the same time she is testifying about the traumas that have stained her life, as can only be read between the lines.” 82 Furthermore, Codde mentions the quest and poetics of absence as well as less specific or characteristic motifs such as unreliable narrators and the failure of everyday language.

What concerns us most, however, is the general approach of those authors towards ethnicity and identity. Though written by young, fully Americanized 3 rd generation Jews, their works of fiction carry a heightened connection with Jewish memory and history. The Holocaust, for instance, is an important force of attraction in the novels mentioned above. One can argue that, paradoxically, Foer, Krauss, Budnitz and also Spiegelman have corroborated and at the same time crushed the alarming assumptions formulated in the Howe doctrine. The “depletion of resources [and the] thinning out of materials and memories” 83 constitutes the core and even the raison d’être of their fiction. But instead of writing novels that serve as a helpless and definitive prove of Howe’s prediction, they have programmatically inserted the unfavorable sociological conditions in their work and are asking themselves the keynote question ‘How can literature serve as an antidote?’. The task of resisting a loss of connection with Jewish memory is not merely an artistic spielerei for the postmemorial writer. In her essay “On Forgetting,”84 Krauss eloquently explains “the burden of those who know they must remember but cannot.” Krauss realizes that her life is light years from the life of her grandparents, but still her life is much influenced by their experiences. So as to pay tribute to her grandparents and to be conscious of how she herself

81 Philippe Codde, “Keeping History At Bay: Absent Presences in Three Recent Jewish American Novels.” Forthcoming in Modern Fiction Studies . 82 Philippe Codde, “Transmitted Holocaust Trauma: A Matter of Myth and Fairy Tales?” European Judaism 42:1 (2009): 62 – 75. Quote on p. 69. 83 Howe in Rovner, 315 84 Nicole Krauss, “On Forgetting.” http://zarine.i.ph/blogs/zarine/2007/04/15/on-forgetting-and-remembering/

came to be, she must remember how they lived, irrespective of how hard that might be. Jonathan Safran Foer has voiced similar concerns. His first novel was actually inspired by a trip to Eastern Europe, where he unsuccessfully tracked down his family’s history. While still there, he vented his frustration and powerlessness by ‘representing’ his failed quest in a work of fiction that served to ‘remember’ the life of his ancestors. The body of postmemorial literature is the outcome of the authors’ desire to come to grips with their unfathomable Jewish heritage, to connect with experiences that they never had themselves but that nevertheless influenced their mindset.

2.2 Postmigration

In his article, Weber briefly mentions postmemory before moving on to Shteyngart, but we can consider it a missed opportunity that he did not connect the two. I contend that Shteyngart and, for example, Foer basically engage in the same sense of ‘postness’ to invigorate their Jewish American fiction. However, whereas Foer applies this postness to the memory of the traumatic Holocaust experiences, Shteyngart applies it to the immigrant experience. In analogy with the term ‘postmemory’, we can call this postness in Shteyngart’s work ‘postmigration’.

My choice for the term ‘postmigration’ is of course a bit arbritary, but it offers two analytical advantages. First, it obviously establishes a link with the concept ‘postmemory’ and its literary realization in the work of 3rd generation writers like Foer and Krauss. This link cannot be neglected; it expresses a shared attitude towards Jewish American literature in the 21 st century. Second, the term at the same time positions Shteyngart’s work within the Jewish American literary tradition of immigrant narratives. The prefix ‘post’ signals an identification as well as a distinction in relation to the theme of the immigrant experience, just as Hirsch’s view on postmemory stresses a connection as well as a rupture with memory and recollection. Derek Parker Royal also uses the prefix ‘post’ when he talks about a Jewish American literary revival that “emphasizes the post-immigrant as well as the post-assimilation experience.” 85 Yet, Royal’s intentions are different. He aims at what comes after migration (and assimilation), rather than at what can be understood as an adaption of it. The ambiguity of Shteyngart’s own situation as an immigrant in America is a suitable base of reference to understand the relevance of postmigration . Having settled in the USA at the age of seven, the young Gary Shteyngart has gone through a process of integration that did not go

85 Royal, 1

smoothly at times. In an interview with Jacques Berlinerblau, Shteyngart says: “I became a second-class citizen, because I was a Russian with two shirts and a bear-like coat.” 86 Surprisingly, Shteyngart’s fiction hardly deals directly with this specific immigrant experience of newly-arrived Soviet Jews trying to find their way on American soil. In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , for instance, Vladimir Girshkin and his family are already several years in America as the story begins. Moreover, Shteyngart aims the plot of his novels at Eastern Europe. Doing so, Shteyngart deliberately distinguishes himself from the canonical immigrant narratives of writers like Abraham Cahan, for whom the immigrant experience is all about forgetting the Old World and assimilating to the New World. But Shteyngart seems unable to connect with that particular conception of the immigrant experience in literature since the circumstances of his own, personal immigrant experience are very different: in the 1980s, there was already a powerful, assimilated Jewish population in America that has smoothed the way for immigrants to come. Rovner also points at this huge difference in immigration circumstances between Cahan’s and Shteyngart’s time:“The experience of being forced to wear one humiliating overcoat pales in comparison to the exhaustion, economic exploitation, and physical danger faced by Lower East Side garment workers.” 87 Although Rovner draws totally different conclusions from this observation, as I will point out in my analysis of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , he is right that Cahan’s shadow, as it were, definitely hangs over Shteyngart’s literary intentions. In order to reconcile his identity as an immigrant – and the accompanying desire to express his immigrant experience in literature in an inspiring way – with the sociological obstacles or personal reluctancy to do so in a traditional, canonical Old World to New World narrative, Shteyngart touches upon remigration as a form of redemption. When asked why he keeps coming back to Eastern Europe and Russia, Shteyngart answers:

I think I keep coming back because I want to understand. Not just where I’m from but who my parents are and how they became the people that they are. I think that’s the only way I can understand my own identity. [...] It’s only when I go back to Russia that I can sort of understand where I came from. That’s the most important thing, and I think that’s why so much Jewish literature, for example, by new writers like Jonathan Safran Foer, is a literature of return, of trying to understand what had befallen these families, and then to figure out who one is, oneself. 88

86 Berlinerblau, 17 87 Rovner, 317 88 Berlinerblau, 5, my emphasis

I contend that the theme of remigration serves in a bigger literary concern that reduces the immigrant experience to its ontological or existential core: a confrontation between varying ethnic or national identities and values. Just like Jonathan Safran Foer (in practical analogy with Hirsch’s theory) abstracts and rehashes the concept ‘memory’ in his work, Shteyngart redefines the immigrant experience by undoing it of the circumstantial, spatio-temporal parameters of the immigration pattern, and by lifting it up to a next, more cerebral level. This abstraction is essentially the function of the postness, both with regard to postmemory and postmigration. On a more direct level, Shteyngart and Foer even seem to rely on the same narratological elements to give shape to this postness. Both writers indulge in irrealistic and absurd adventure stories that grant a lot of freedom of movement to the protagonists. The precise faculties of Shteyngart’s postmigration fiction, however, will be discussed in the next chapter. The concept of postmigration, as I have defined it now, mainly applies to Absurdistan and especially to The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , Vladimir Girshkin wants to be a repatriate and spends his days in the post-Soviet satellite republic of Stolovaya, where he straddles between an organisation of Russian criminals and a progressive American expatriate community. In the end, Vladimir returns to America but settles in the all- American Midwest (Ohio) instead of New York. The confrontations between numerous unfixed identities, values and experiences account for the dynamics of the story: there is Vladimir’s Soviet upbringing, the world that he encounters in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, the experience of being an immigrant in New York, of being an American ‘remigrant’ in Eastern Europe, of being a Jew everywhere and so on. Different components of Vladimir’s ethnic, national, familial or personal identity engage in an organic, hybrid network that allows the components to mutate, merge, split and disappear and that often raises more questions for Vladimir than it offers answers. Moreover, Shteyngart’s modus of postmigration uncouples any experience or performance of identity from a fixed spatiotemporal pattern in a globalist world where borders of any kind are object to interpretation and revision. In this respect, Weber’s quote that “the immigrant narrative may well provide the most enabling, creative source for those writers seeking to engage the New World -- any New World” 89 succinctly voices the postmigration concern. This is just a synopsis of the postmigration dimension in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , so as to illustrate the postmigration concept. A conclusive analysis will be presented in the ‘close reading’ part of this thesis. Moreover, in my analysis of Super Sad True Love Story , which does not feature an immigration pattern, I will modify the significance of postmigration in Shteyngart’s literary project.

89 Weber, no pag., my emphasis

III. POSTMIGRATION AND IDENTITY

[ In this chapter, I will elaborate on the nature and role of identity in Shteyngart’s postmigration fiction. Moreover, I will compare my findings to a discussion of identity in contemporary Jewish American literature in general, so as to situate Shteyngart’s fiction in the tradition of which it is part. ]

In the previous chapter, I have already briefly touched upon how a postmigration-focused approach to Shteyngart’s fiction can serve as a framework to reflect on matters of ethnic and national identity. Essentially, the assertion of identity undergoes the same ‘postness’ as the representation of migration, since the immigrant experience in Shteyngart’s postmigration fiction is no more or no less than a performative externalization of identity permutations.

1. THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE PLANET: IMMIGRATION PATTERNS

In his article “Questions of Identity: The New World of the Immigrant Writer,” Morris Dickstein shows great interest in how Gary Shteyngart, David Bezmozgis, Lara Vapnyar and other immigrant writers from Eastern Europe (like the Bosnian writer Aleksander Hemon) find their own, distinct voice to express what they think it means to be an immigrant in the 21 st century. Though heterogeneous in its style and thematics, the body of literature of these new emigré writers, Dickstein amply illustrates, is permeated with a shared sense of unstable identity. The crucial connection between the immigrant experience and the ‘identity experience’ is stressed in the conclusion of the article:

Where immigrant writing was once naturalistic and focused on the material conditions of life, and later (beginning with Henry Roth) more modernist, probing the immigrant’s psychological formation, these new writers have concentrated on

questions of identity in a world in which both the geography of the planet and the geography of the mind have shifted and turned more fluid. 90

The ‘geography of the planet’ refers to the immigration patterns, whereas the ‘geography of the mind’ accounts for the representation of identity. This quote, though formulated as a conclusion in the article of Dickstein, can well be used as a point of departure for the discussion of the identity politics in Shteyngart’s work.

What immediately begs one’s attention in Dickstein’s article is the comparison with the Jewish American literary pioneers around 1900. It seems almost impossible, or at least highly unsatisfactory, to conduct an extensive discussion of identity matters in the new immigrant literature without referring to the representation of identity in the work of Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin or Anzia Yezierska. In her article “Nostalgia, Nationhood, and the New Immigrant Narrative: Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and the Post-Soviet Experience,”91 Natalie Friedman also falls back on those earlier immigrant narratives. She characterizes them by means of William Boelhower’s narratological research. According to Friedman, Boelhower “recognized certain patterns in immigrant autobiography that reappear in various guises. [...] Each [story] begins with a moment of ‘dream anticipation,’ which is then followed by a period of transformation and confirmation, variation, negation and substitution of the codes of the dominant culture.” 92 Friedman applies this pattern to the older immigrant narratives (autobiographies as well as fiction stories) and concludes that Boelhower’s narratological pattern can be discerned, to a large extent, in most of them: they begin in the miserable Old World and then capture the hopeful journey to the New World, where the painful process of assimilation sets in (as I have already illustrated in the beginning of the historical overview). For instance, Dickstein draws on Mary Antin’s classic memoir illustrate this fixed one-way pattern, stating that “her whole book is a journey from one identity to another, a ‘second birth.’” 93 Needless to say, the immigration patterns have altered radically through the years. For one, the living situation in the lands of origin is less dramatic in, let’s say, 1980 than in 1880. Dickstein reminds us that “[Recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe’s] well-educated parents grew up in a fiercely secular society. Their surviving grandparents gave them a taste, but

90 Dickstein, 130 91 Natalie Friedman, “Nostalgia, Nationhood and the New Immigrant Narrative: Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and the Post-Soviet Experience.” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 5 (2004), no pag. 92 Friedman, no pag. 93 Dickstein, 119

only a taste, of the old world of Russian Jews.” 94 Not only the push factor, but also the pull factor and the way that immigrants experience their journey to and stay in the ‘New World’ is totally different, and more diverse. Many literary examples of these ad hoc immigration patterns can be found among the new immigrant writers. For example, in her novel Petropolis 95 (2008), Anya Ulinich stages a kind of immigrant experience that stands in sharp contrast to its predecessors. In the story, the young Sasha Goldberg is sick of her miserable life in Siberia and signs up for a mail-order bridal service in order to gain entrance to the USA. Once there, however, she is soon disillusioned with her life in suburban Arizona and decides to leave her American fiance. In the misadventure-filled journey across America that ensues, Sasha tries to track down her father, who left for America many years ago, leaving his family behind. The exceptional circumstances that brought Sasha to America account for an exceptional, atypical immigrant experience that encompasses matters of identity in new, loose narratological structure. Another fine example of this tendency to recapture the immigrant experience in literature from a very different angle is David Bezmozgis’s first novel The Free World 96 (2011). Following in the footsteps of Maxim D. Shrayer’s Waiting For America 97 (2007), Bezmozgis is one of the first American writers to tell the story of Jewish Russian emigrants that await their fate in Italy. In The Free World , The Krasnansky family spends the summer and fall of 1978 in Rome before heading for their new homeland, the real New World. The in-between period in Italy sheds new light on the diasporic condition of the Jewish Soviet emigrés and blurs the classic border between the Old and the New World, Western Europe being a sort of purgatory. The temporary stay in that purgatory heavily influences the Krasnansky family in their assessment of Jewish ethnicity and nationhood, as Donald Weber points out in his review of the novel.98 Moreover, he argues that the novel “exemplifies the recent turn [...] in contemporary Jewish writing towards the historicist and transnational.”99 This ‘transnational’ applies to the work of Shteyngart as well. Yet, I claim that there is a crucial difference that begs for an individual assessment of Shteygnart’s fiction. In his article “Questions of Identity,” Dickstein also detects the lack of a clear-cut, uniform immigration pattern in contemporary Jewish immigrant fiction, stating that “[t]he relations between the old world and the new, like [the characters’] own identities, have grown more complex since Antin’s time.” 100 Indeed, the highly individualized immigration circumstances in the globalized world allow for an anti-linear, dynamic and instant representation of the

94 Dickstein, 121 95 Anya Ulinich, Petropolis. 2007. (New York: Viking, 2007) 96 David Bezmozgis, The Free World . 2011. (London: Penguin Books, 2011) 97 Maxim D. Shrayer, Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration. 2007. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007) 98 Donald Weber, “The Free World.” (Review slated for summer 2011 in Jewish Review of Books ) 99 Weber, “The Free World”, no pag. 100 Dickstein, 122

immigrant experience. Dickstein calls upon one of Lara Vapnyar’s short stories, “Borscht,”101 to make himself clear. The story deals with a Russian immigrant who is in America temporarily to earn some money for his wife and family in Russia. In Brighton Beach, a largely Russian neighbourhood in New York, he meets with a prostitute who is also married, and also there temporarily to earn some money. Both are in a very undetermined position. They long for life back home but at the same time they realize that their respective partners are actually less than eager to have them back. Brighton Beach, an eery, poor imitation of the Old World, adds up to this feeling of dislocation and disconnection. Dickstein remarks that “these are immigrants who can always go back, who go back and forth all the time,”102 be it physically or mentally, which unsettles their identities and their conceptions of ‘home’. Dickstein concludes:

It is precisely this fluid, ‘postmodern’ sense of identity that makes the current crop of immigrants – and immigrant writers – so different. Just as their journeys are different from the steamer travel of old, and much less definitive, so are their identities labile in ways Antin could not have imagined.103

Or, if borrowing the words from Dickstein’s earlier quote, we can say that the ‘geography of the planet’ projects its transformations on the ‘geography of the mind’.

2. THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE MIND: IDENTITY POLITICS

Until now, I have only used the term ‘postmigration’ to refer to the work of Shteyngart. Yet, as Dickstein’s evaluation of migration and identity in the new immigrant literature has shown, the ‘postness’ is an active ingredient in the works of Vapnyar, Bezmozgis and others as well, as the representation of the immigrant experience and the identity permutations is affected by a postmodern atmosphere. Nevertheless, there are reasons to hold that the concept of postmigration, as I have defined it in this thesis, does not apply to the whole generation of new immigrant writers but only to the work of Shteyngart specifically. Naturally, the idea that the changing immigration circumstances have repercussions on how identity is perceived or asserted in literature, is logical and perhaps a bit gratuitous. Still, when investigating the identity politics in Shteyngart’s fiction, we can see that there is something

101 Lara Vapnyar. “Borscht,” Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love . (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 25 – 50 102 Dickstein, 122 103 Dickstein, 122-3

more going on than that. Dickstein’s claim that Shteyngart is an “instinctive posmodernist for whom immigration epitomizes the instability of modern identity” 104 serves as a valuable source of inspiration here. In the immigrant narratives of Mary Antin and Abraham Cahan, but also in the works of Anya Ulinich, David Bezmozgis and Lara Vapnyar discussed above, the nature of the immigration experience informs the representations of identity. In the novels of Shteyngart, however, quite the opposite takes place: the “instability of modern identity” 105 informs the representation of immigration, and not the other way around. Shteyngart’s point of departure is not a immigration pattern that is relatively closely tied to historical or even biographical immigrant experiences like in Bezmozgis, Vapnyar or Antin. Friedman agrees with that: “Shteyngart is also less concerned with representing realist details of immigration and assimilation. [His] work signals a departure from the accepted tropes and traditions of the immigrant novel in America because it is an absurd story about travel, international crime, and post-national accomodation more than it is about Americanization.”106 Rather, the primary foundation of Shteyngart’s work is what Dickstein calls “this fluid, ‘postmodern’ sense of identity” 107 that Shteyngart tends to convey in literature in its purest form. According to Friedman, this fluid sense of identity is basically the immigrant’s “ambivalence about his status in America,”108 the possibility of physically or mentally going back and forth between different places and different identities. That ambivalence also pops up in the stories of the other new immigrant writers, to be sure, but in Shteyngart’s work, it is a poetical guideline of the story rather than a circumstantial theme in the story. The postmigration dimension in Shteyngart’s fiction functions in this approach as a means to insert the identity politics in an utterly flexible narrative form that allows for a free expression. To put it simply: the highly fictional, ad hoc immigration stories of Shteyngart are ‘merely’ meant to illustrate a sense of ambivalent, hybrid, organic identity that is experienced by the 21 st -century immigrant. This rather abstract analysis begs for a few quick examplary comments. In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , the postmigration dimension features a temporary remigration to the city of Prava. According to Dickstein, Prava is “that fluid space, where almost anything can happen.” 109 Shteyngart’s choice for a fictitious place of action indeed lines up perfectly with my claim that he is primarily concerned with the explicit externalization of identity matters. Prava is a fluid space, not very much restricted by historical or geographical referentiality, and especially designed for a

104 Dickstein, 124 105 Dickstein, 124 106 Friedman, no pag. 107 Dickstein, 122-3 108 Friedman, no pag. 109 Dickstein, 125

fluid, postmodern identity complex. In Absurdistan , the situation is slightly different, but I will explain that in the ‘close reading’ part of this thesis. However, it is safe to assert that both novels actually embrace the same principle: matters of identity and mentality – personal or cultural – are brought up, externalized, carried out and confronted in a highly flexible ad hoc postmigration setting that serves as a laboratory for social or psychological experiments. So in brief, using Dickstein’s words again, we can conclude that the postmigration dimension in Shteyngart’s work is characterized by the faculty that the ‘geography of the mind’ informs the ‘geography of the planet’ – and not the other way around.

3. IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

In order to have a better look on the representation of identity in Shteyngart’s fiction, it proves interesting to examine the poetical significance of identity in the literary genre or tradition in which Shteyngart can be situated. In her article “Identity Matters: Contemporary Jewish American Writing,” 110 Tresa Grauer detects and describes the major points of interest in the attitude of contemporary Jewish American fiction towards identity. The article, that served as a contribution to the 2003 Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature , is written just before the emergence of Gary Shteyngart and the other Russian emigrés on the American literary scene, so Grauer does not directly refer to them. Yet, the article offers a number of observations and conclusions that apply to the work of Shteyngart as well.

Grauer starts off by claiming that the weakness of the so-called Howe doctrine lies in the attempt to pin down Jewish American literature on a single definition. According to Grauer, categories such as the immigrant experience, blood, language or religiosity are no longer useful, because “the very idea of identifying ‘criteria’ subscribes to an essentialized notion of authenticity or truth that many writers today simply do not share.” 111 The reluctancy among contemporary writers to take an implicit Jewish essence in literature for granted is directly related to the interpretation of Jewish American identity in general, and it might be a defensive reaction against bad tidings regarding the evaporation of

110 Tresa Grauer, “Identity Matters: Contemporary Jewish American Writing,” The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature , eds Hana Wirth-Nesher and Michael P. Kramer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 269 – 284 111 Grauer, 270

Jewish American ‘felt’ life. In his article “Race, Literary History, and the ‘Jewish’ Question,”112 Michael P. Kramer analyzes the significance of the question “What is Jewish literature?” and gives an historical overview of several major attempts to answer it. The difficulty of formulating a conclusive answer to the question, Kramer asserts, lies in the fact that it is inextricably bound up with the political and delicate question “Who is a Jew?” (or worse: “Who is a good Jew?”). The enormous heterogeneity of the Jewish people, along with the overpowering process of assimilation, makes it almost impossible to give a conclusive answer to that question, so “a declaration of indefinability and an acceptance of pluralism and relativism have in the course of events become not only necessary and practical, but even ethically desirable,”113 so Kramer says. Consequently, the demarcation of Jewish literature cannot be achieved by falling back on subjective criteria for inclusion. Instead, Kramer supports the idea that “Jewish literature is simply literature written by Jews ... all Jews, regardless of any relationship to Judaism or Yiddishkayt .” 114 The reassurance that the race of the author suffices to position a work within the confines of Jewish literary tradition makes that all pressure to distinguish an essentialized sense of Jewish identity falls off for writers and critics alike. By posing no intrinsically literary conditions for its demarcation, Jewish literary tradition seems to defend itself against the unfavorable sociocultural circumstances that were already voiced by Howe (the undetermined interpretation of the label ‘Jewish’, that is). The race of the author is a fairly objective and extrinsic condition that frees literary criticism from the burden of looking for cultural Jewish essentials in the text. By holding on to the Jewish descent of the author to justify a certain Jewish orientation of his work, all options to assert or distinguish Jewish identity specifically in the text itself are left open. 115 Kramer corroborates his opinion by calling upon reputed critics like Howard Eilberg- Schwarz and Daniel Boyarin, who also acknowledge the crucial role of race and genealogy when it comes to determining the notion of Jewishness while at the same time escaping the taint of racism.116 Other critics, like Hana Wirth-Nesher, resist that approach because they find it liable to open the door to cultural (and more specifically: literary) criticism that abuses racial generalizations. Kramer clarifies: “[Wirth-Nesher’s] objection has to do with the suspicion that, if race is said to define the category, it must be thought to inform the literature as well.” 117 In other words, Wirth-Nesher thinks that the literarily extrinsic condition of race will have repercussions

112 Michael P. Kramer, “Race, Literary History, and the ‘Jewish’ Question.” Prooftexts 21:3 (2001): 287 – 321 113 Kramer, “Race,” 289 114 Kramer, “Race,” 289 115 Contrary to what might seem the case, Kramer is not dogmatic about the primordial importance of race: he comments that race is not the end of Jewish literary study but rather its beginning, its point of departure. The cultural dimension of Jewish literature also deserves attention. How we have to conceive of that attention, however, is not specified. 116 Kramer, “Race,” 291 – 2 117 Kramer, “Race,” 291

on the debate on identity in the works of fiction; that it will unevitably lead to assumptions regarding Jewish (racial) essentialism within the literary texts. Unfortunately, in her article, Grauer does not make the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic categories of inclusion (unlike Kramer and Wirth-Nesher). The race of the author, the linguistic features of the text, the thematic topics within the text and other criteria are all packed together and dismissed because they are said to lead to an “essentialized notion of authenticity or truth that many writers today simply do not share.”118 Hence, Grauer sees it different. To her, the solution lies in the self-consciousness of contemporary Jewish Amercian literature: “The rich array of literary texts that has emerged over the past twenty-five years should be examined less for its coherence as a body of literature defined by an identity as for its focus on it.” 119 So what gives those works a Jewish orientation is the poetical search for what it means to be Jewish. As a result, Grauer observes that contemporary Jewish American writing, as well as cultural criticism, stresses a performative or constructive identity, rather than an essentialized identity:

The most serious critique of identity politics to date comes from those who question the very possibility of defining a unified identity as something inherent, authentic, and stable. Despite the deep-rootedness of the belief that identity is grounded in the “truth” of something larger than ourselves, critics today generally argue that identity is formed in specific historical and cultural circumstances, dependent on the social and discursive factors that bring it into being. 120

Grauer believes that contemporary Jewish American literature heavily supports and carries out this ‘relativist’ notion of identity. The ‘specific historical and cultural circumstances’ of which she speaks are supposed to be enmeshed in the narratives themselves and not (like it used to be, according to Grauer, in earlier generations of Jewish American writing) in the debate that surrounds literary production. She contends that this intra-literary realization of identity enhances the autonomy and creative potential of the narrative, so much so that “contemporary Jewish American identity depends , to a large extent, on the mediation of narrative.”121 This implies a shift in focus. Whereas Jewish American writers may once have been concerned with the question “Who/What is a contemporary American Jew?” they are now asking instead “How do we, as contemporary American Jews, represent ourselves?” 122

118 Grauer, 270 119 Grauer, 270 120 Grauer, 271 121 Grauer, 272 122 Grauer, 272

In short, Grauer brings three major points regarding identity in contemporary Jewish American fiction to our attention. First, she characterizes the latest generation of the genre as self-conscious: the quest for identity is inscribed programmatically. Literature is Jewish if it searches for the meaning of ‘Jewish’. Second, identity is non-essentialist and performative: it is not determined by biology or genealogy and must not be considered a fixed, hidden reality that one has to reveal, but an inner construction that one has to build. Third, the mediation of narrative informs the assertion of identity: literature is a source of inspiration for identity, rather than a mirror of identity. Cultural critic Stuart Hall’s claim that identity is not a “transparent [...] already accomplished fact,” but “never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside [literary] representation”123 aptly summarizes Grauer’s findings.

The three ‘touchstones’ concerning identity in contemporary Jewish American literature that I have distilled from Grauer’s article fit in very well with my analysis of the identity politics in Shteyngart’s fiction. As a matter of fact, the postmigration concept, as it has been construed so far, incorporates most of Grauer’s findings. In the ‘close reading’ part of this thesis, I will have a closer look on how Shteyngart’s novels illustrate those identity politics precisely, but, on a theoretical level, the similarities are already clear. Shteyngart’s fiction is indeed self-conscious, as the postmigration dimension accounts for a poetical focus on identity. The search for identity is inscribed programmatically in Shteyngart’s fiction and carried out literally, almost metaphorically, as the protagonists return to Eastern Europe. Consequently, identity in Shteyngart’s fiction is conceived of as non-essentialist, because the assertion of an essentialist identity would counteract the whole postmigration project. When traces of an essentialized identity do pop up in Shteyngart’s fiction, they are performatively rehashed by means of Shteyngart’s irony, which is an important feature in his literary voice. 124 Grauer’s third touchstone, the mediation of narrative, is also implied in the postmigration concept, which stresses the artistically artificial nature of the story. Moreover, on an intradiegetic level, the numerous literary references in Sheyngart’s novels enhance the significance of literature in the renegotiation of identities and mentalities.

Now that I have sketched a rather theoretical assessment of the nature of identity in contemporary Jewish American literature in general, and the postmigration concept in Shteyngart’s fiction in particular, we can turn to a close reading of Shteyngart’s three novels.

123 Hall in Grauer, 271 124 In my discussion of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , I will give an extensive account of this irony.

PART TWO - close reading -

IV. IDENTITY PERMUTATIONS IN THE RUSSIAN DEBUTANTE’S HANDBOOK

[ In this chapter, I will discuss Shteyngart’s first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . First, I will draw attention to the stock figure of the schlemiel and its repercussions on the assertion of Jewish identity in the novel. Afterwards, I will have a closer look on how The Russian Debutante’s Handbook comments on matters of assimilation and the debate about multiculturalism in the USA. ]

1. THE AMBIGUITY OF JEWISH IDENTITY

1.1 Shteyngart’s ethnic shtick

I started this thesis with the article by Adam Rovner on what he calls ‘The New Immigrant Chic’. It will be recalled that Rovner questions the ‘uprightness’ of the newest wave of Jewish American literature which includes (among others) Gary Shteyngart, David Bezmozgis and Lara Vapnyar. He accuses them of abusing their Jewish lineage to assert a difference that people are nowadays looking for in order to distinguish themselves from the globalized mass. However, because the process of assimilation has estranged them from Jewish life, religion and culture, they are bound to “claim a vicarious Jewish distinctiveness that only underscores the succesful acculturation of earlier generations of Jews into the American mainstream.” 125

125 Rovner, 317

I have waited deliberately till now to discuss and unpack Rovner’s condensed article. Rovner’s introductory comments on the Howe doctrine, on the new wave of Jewish American writers, and the socio-cultural paradox that overshadows their work have already been discussed. Now we can get to the core of Rovner’s discourse: Jewish identity in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . Rovners comments transcend a merely observational or objective point of view and can be considered quite harsh at times – though mostly substantiated.

Already in the beginning of his article, Rovner announces (or warns) that he will “sing the praises of the recent wave of American Jewish immigrant writing in a minor key,” 126 but rather than attacking the authors directly, he commits himself, fairly enough, to criticising the phenomenon of their collective popularity. Rovner explains the paradox (a renewed interest in Jewish American literature as opposed to the waning of Jewish distinctiveness in American life) as an impotent attempt to fulfil the need of difference. He does not object to that need per se , but he finds the repertoire which is at the new Jewish American writers’ disposal minimal, unworthy and not at all as creative or original as it might seem at first sight. Yet, contrary to what is the case with many critics, Rovner avoids simply or automatically reciting the famous 1977 Howe statement as a mantra (or a mourners’ kaddish ). He admits that Howe’s ideas “might be more true than we care to admit” and that “‘American Jewish fiction has moved past its high point,’ but for the wrong reasons.” 127 Interestingly, Rovner thinks that the New Immigrant Chic and Howe both have an essentialist notion of Jewish identity. In the case of Howe, Jewishness is “fundamentally tied to the lost ‘world of our fathers.’” 128 By referring to Howe’s magnum opus World of Our Fathers , Rovner resists the idea that (American) Judaism is pure only when it exists apart from American culture. Likewise, Rovner claims, Shteyngart and the other writers of the new wave suggest a “transhistorical and transnational Jewish essence that marks their protagonists as inalterably Other.” 129 Rovner argues that that compulsive Otherness does not have anything to do anymore with an honest contemplation of what Jewishness still means in the 21 st century. In order to give his indictment more body, Rovner refers to a poignant term coined by scholar Michael P. Kramer in his review essay “Beyond Ambivalence: (Re)imagining Jewish American Culture; Or, ‘Isn’t That the Way the Old Assimilated Story Goes?’” 130 The essay confronts several theoretical approaches towards assimilation and identity of American Jews.

126 Rovner, 314 127 Rovner, 316 128 Rovner, 316 129 Rovner, 316 130 Kramer, Michael P. “Beyond Ambivalence: (Re)imagining Jewish American Culture; Or, ‘Isn’t That the Way the Old Assimilated Story Goes?’” American Jewish History 88:3 (2000): 407 – 415

Kramer basically uses the term ‘ethnic shtick’ to refer to a flexible assertion of Jewishness that is opposed to a religiously inspired assertion. Rovner, in his turn, defines (or recycles) the ethnic shtick as “a self-referential, jokey pastiche of Jewish difference that, to my mind, signals the ‘depletion of resources’ that Howe predicted.” 131 Unappropriate nostalgia for earlier times, when the hard immigrant experience was still central to the existence and survival of the Chosen People, is a common feature of the ethnic shtick . A relatively early example of this nostalgic shtick , Rovner mentions, is the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof . Set in Tsarist Russia in 1905, the muscial stages the story of a Jewish family whose traditions and religion are threatened from all sides. Especially among more conservative Jews, the musical evoked much indignant criticism. Critic Cynthia Ozick, for instance, condemned it for milking “nostalgia for a sweeter time, pogroms notwithstanding.” 132 Irving Howe also vehemently (though indirectly) disapproved of the unappropriate sentimentality of Fiddler on the Roof in his short essay “Immigrant Chic.”133 Let the following two quotes speak for themselves and at once illuminate where Rovner got his inspiration for his ‘New Immigrant Chic’.

What at times leaves me a little irritated is the upsurge of nostalgia I detect among a good many young people for the immigrant world to which I was already a latecomer and of which they barely know. [...] They’re nostalgic for the nostalgia of other people.

For I don’t want the immigrant-Jewish milieu – it’s my life, you understand – to become “material” for chic museum displays and cozy Yinglish musicals. I don’t want the world of my youth to be worked over (I almost said pawed) by sweet- tempered but ignorant filmmakers. I don’t want the lost hopes and surviving pains, the memories that still chafe, to become occasions, or pretexts, for philistine observances among affluent Jews. 134

The stark contrast between the hardships suffered by Lower East Side immigrants back in time and the status-related ‘problems’ of the immigrant experience depicted in Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook is reason enough for Rovner to put forward that “Contemporary American- Jewish-Russian writers offer readers a new immigrant chic, their multiply hyphenated identities

131 Rovner, 316 132 Cynthia Ozick in Alisa Solomon, “How ‘Fiddler’ Became Folklore.” Forward (9-1-2006): http://www.forward.com/articles/1710 133 Irving Howe, “Immigrant Chic.” New York Magazine (5-12-1986): 76 134 Howe, “Immigrant Chic,” 76

nesting like matroyshka dolls.” 135 So to put it bluntly: Shteyngart is situated by Rovner in the cultural tradition of ethnic kitsch, hypersensitive identity-mongering affectation and essentialist identity. But what does this supposed ethnic shtick look like exactly in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook ? Most elements supporting Rovner’s reading can be found in the first part of the story, the part set in New York which functions as an exposé for the profiling of Vladimir Girshkin before the adventurous story really unfolds. The focus on the Jewish physical features of Vladimir is an important element in this respect. A memorable scene is the one where Vladimir’s well-assimilated and successful mother actually accuses her son of walking ‘like a Jew’: “I’ve been keeping an eye on you for years, but it just hit me today, your little Jew-walk. Come here, and I’ll teach you to walk like a normal person.” 136 The stereotype of the physically weak and unimpressive Jew is also represented in Vladimir: a casual jog leaves him exhausted, feeling “globs of mucus coagulate in his defective lungs while he hobbled from one foot to the next like one of those awkward Floridian birds.” 137 The graphic quality of those two scenes (as of many others) adds up to a sense of almost pathetic vulnerability and weakness. This leads us directly to another major Jewish trait of the ethnic shtick , what Rovner calls “the Jew as unalloyed victim.” 138 Indeed, the poor and unattractive Vladimir lives a burdensome life: he has an unsatisfactory job, works for a measly $8/hour and realizes, on his 25 th birthday, that he has accomplished nothing yet. A series of misfortunes eventually prompt Vladimir to flee from America. First he is totally humiliated by the rich parents of his new girlfriend Fran, who see in him a sort of pet for their precious, genial daughter, and later he almost gets raped by a rich Catalan drug lord called Jordi. In Prava, things seem to get better at first, but after a while it turns out that Vladimir cannot cope with the hard existence of being a mob gangster. Almost inevitably, his victimlike nature surfaces again: he gets in trouble with his boss, who orders a few skinheads to give the terrified Vladimir a serious beating. Vladimir even explicitly identifies himself (or the Russian Jew in general) as the ultimate victim: “A Russian Jew (knowledgeable or not), however, expects both history and a Russian to kick him in the ass, the face, and every other place where a kick can be reasonably lodged. Vladimir understood this.” 139 According to Rovner, the Jewish American obsession with victimhood also surfaces in the writings of Thane Rosenbaum, Melvin Jules Bukiet and Jonathan Safran Foer, who, to some extent, assert a vicarious victimhood concerning the Holocaust through 2 nd or 3 rd generation

135 Rovner, 317 136 RDH , 45 137 RDH , 224 138 Rovner, 318 139 RDH , 347

trauma. Rovner concludes that in these works of fiction, “Jews are rendered as distinct, chosen either by genetics or history for a special, often grim fate.” 140 Rovner at times goes quite far with his ‘observations’, eventually even straying in the borderland between harsh but acceptable cultural criticism and downright hostility (over-the-top conclusions): “As American Jewish economic and political power continues to grow, perhaps readers like to be reminded of a time when Jews were a small, embarrassed community of foreigners speaking in Yiddish accents.” Having sketched the hard and unromantic life of the ghetto Jews just a few pages before, Rovner seems to realize at once that even his hedging (‘perhaps’) is not sufficient to temper the slightly insulting effect of his words. Therefore he immediately tries to wrap his accusation in compliments, assuring that the writers are talented and witty and that “[t]here is much more to these books than a beggarly revelation of scars for the gratification of others.” 141 But the former quote resounds disturbingly. In one of the last paragraphs of his article, however, Rovner brings up an idea that is more stimulating and analytically interesting than his statement about a supposed Jewish cultural masochism. Rovner briefly puts forward the concept of the schlemiel , which is roughly a Jewish version of the clownish loser, and connects it to the character of Vladimir Girshkin. Unfortunately, Rovner does not elaborate on this vein of thought; he merely mentions that the Jewish schlemiel remains a “convenient and popular metaphor” 142 for the ‘vices’ of contemporary Jewish American fiction discussed throughout the article. The fact that Rovner does not explore this side-thought any further is a missed opportunity. As I will hope to show, the schlemiel concept can be very useful to answer questions regarding ethnic (Jewish) identity in Shteyngart’s work.

Rovner’s observations regarding the assertion of Jewish identity as a focus on victimhood and schlemiel-like qualities are accurate and proof of a pervasive critical voice. Other important critics also recognize that identity, and especially the Jewish identity of the protagonists, in Shteyngart’s work is mostly construed by means of rather negative elements. Morris Dickstein, for instance, notices that Vladimir Girshkin “experiences himself as a Jew only in his sense of marginality, or when he sees himself as schlemiel-like, inept, physically clumsy or when he’s cursed out as a Jew, or begins an affair with a wholesome American girl.” 143 Shteyngart makes this extreme self- questioning (sometimes bordering to self-humiliation) something of a trancelike, compulsive habit. It is an important feature of Shteyngart’s persona – be it fictional character or personal

140 Rovner, 319 141 Rovner, 318 142 Rovner, 323 143 Dickstein, 125

imago. A lovely example of the latter is the promotional video for his latest novel Super Sad True Love Story .144 In the parodic clip, Shteyngart acts like a total schlemiel, an unrespected analphabetic moron who “demands his advance be payed entirely in smoked meat, pickled tomatoes and three recently graduated debutantes from Mount Holyoke.” Although Rovner gives a very useful evaluation of how The Russian Debutante’s Handbook is imbued with this ethnic negativity, he draws from those observations a number of harsh conclusions that rather give proof of an uncreative sociocultural outlook. His belief that the protagonist’s schlemiel-dom essentializes his identity is directly linked to the assumption that the towering shadow of assimilation hangs over the novel’s identity politics, making every effort willfully to assert authentic Jewishness futile, pathetic and even reactionary: “That immigrant writers postulate some Jewish essence grounded in prevalent stereotype [the schlemiel] and are celebrated for doing so suggests, as Howe predicted, that American Jewish resources and memories are being depleted.” 145 In the course of his article, Rovner thus literally objects to Grauer’s conclusion that contemporary Jewish American fiction displays a non-essentialist identity. A closer look at the schlemiel feature (which spans most of the ethnic identity politics in the novel) can help put things in perspective and to show that Rovner’s pessimism is largely based on a – willful? – denial of three major undercurrents in Shteyngart’s fiction: trauma, irony and, more generally, the postmigration dimension as set out earlier in this thesis. The central motif of the schlemiel enables us to gain access to those three undercurrents.

1.2 The schlemiel as the tragic, ironic hero in exile

Ruth Wisse’s book The Schlemiel as Modern Hero 146 gives a succinct but illuminating overview of the nature and role of the schlemiel in American (and Yiddish) literature. Next to enumerating some obvious traits of the stock figure (“harmless and disliked,” “vulnerable and inept,” “neither saintly nor pure, but only weak” 147 ) Wisse also provides us with a more conclusive definition and situation of the stereotype which is absolutely worth citing:

Vulnerable, ineffectual in his efforts at self-advancement and self-preservation, he emerged as the archetypical Jew, especially in his capacity of potential victim . Since

144 Random House promo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfzuOu4UIOU 145 Rovner, 324 146 Ruth R. Wisse, The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. 1971 (Chicago: The University of Chicage Press, 1980) 147 Wisse, Schlemiel , x

Jewry’s attitudes toward its own frailty were complex and contradictory, the schlemiel was sometimes berated for his foolish weakness, and elsewhere exalted for his hard inner strength. For the reformers who sought ways of strengthtening and improving Jewish life and laws, the schlemiel embodied those negative qualities of weakness that had to be ridiculed to be overcome. Conversely, to the degree that Jews looked upon their disabilities as external afflictions, sustained through no fault of their own, they used the schlemiel as the model of endurance, his innocence a shield against corruption, his absolute defenselessness the only guaranteed defense against the brutalizing potential of might. 148

Wisse’s explanation of the cultural phenomenon of the schlemiel seems to fit in with Rovner’s ideas on the essentialist identity in Shteyngart’s fiction, since she defines the schlemiel in terms of the archetypical and victimhood (cf. emphasis). Yet, rather than depicting the schlemiel as a kind of plan B for nostalgic writers (or readers) who want to connect with Jewish identity and who are unable to do so without merely attaining a watered-down, superficial ethnic shtick , Wisse reveals the metaphorical functions underneath. On the one hand, the schlemiel can serve as a stock figure that embodies all the negative, stereotypical traits of ‘the Jew’. Wisse points out that the intention is to part with the stereotypes by mocking them, not to cherish them as Rovner suggests. On the other hand, the schlemiel can be seen as a semi-hero, who is threatened by an evil outside world but still manages to go on. In that case, the schlemiel becomes paradoxically positive. In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , both approaches to the schlemiel are represented.

First, the evocation of the schlemiel in Vladimir Girshkin can suggest a hidden way to cope with a traumatic, or at least psyhologically puzzling, immigrant expierence. As said before, the situation of Jewish Russian immigrants in the second half of the 20 th century pales in comparison with that of their ghetto counterparts around 1900. Still, the process of transition experienced by many of the Jewish-Russian-American writers of the literary wave at stake must have remained difficult. In her essay “The Writer as Tour Guide,”149 Lara Vapnyar gives a nuanced impression of what emigration from Russia meant to her. She tells that, in the course of her life in the rather anti-semitic Soviet Union, she associated more and more negative aspects of her life with her being Jewish. Being Jewish meant “eating different food: pale and bland,” “getting sick a lot, or being expected to get sick by your mother,” “being laughed at for wearing your winter coat in the

148 Wisse, Schlemiel , 4 – 5, my emphasis 149 Lara Vapnyar, “The Writer as Tour Guide,” The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature , ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 92 – 109

middle of spring,” “constantly failing in physical education” 150 and so on. In short, being Jewish meant being ashamed of being Jewish. Once she arrived in the USA, she realized that “[s]uddenly, such designations seemed too small, too insignificant, too ridiculous even. [...] I felt like an imposter.” 151 The aftereffects of the uneasy life in the Old Country, however, remain: one cannot shake of one’s former life entirely. But to to be self-conscious about one’s inherently Jewish estrangement might be perceived in the USA as presumptuous, inappropriately nostalgic or disturbingly hypersensitive behaviour, as Rovner suggests. In this case, the image of the schlemiel can serve as a platform for an artistic externalization of the trauma. In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , Vladimir Girshkin is the alter ego that is allowed to be self-conscious about the (imagined?) negative aspects of his life as a Jew, that is allowed to connect his failures in life with his being Jewish, and that is allowed to carry his helplessness and social estrangement as a paper crown, exactly because he is a schlemiel. Vladimir’s recollections of his childhood are scarce but meaningful, and they give an impression of an anti-semitic society. A powerful scene, which is repeated or referred to throughout the story, is the departure of the Girshkin family from Russia in 1980. One can easily see the traumatic effect of that event on the then 12-year-old Vladimir. In the customs hall of the airport of Leningrad, the Girshkins have a hostile encounter with agents of the Interior Ministry, who are “now completely without reason for conceiling their hatred for the soon-to-be ex-Soviet family before them” 152 and who ravish their luggage in search for gold, diamonds or other valuables. One of the agents comes up to Vladimir’s mother and speaks the threatening words: “You’ll be back, Yid.” 153 Vladimir’s accurate description of the agent’s posture, smell, and “mouth frighteningly empty of teeth” suggests the overwhelming impact of this threat on the young Vladimir. Although Vladimir admits that he “had been called [a Yid] every time his health allowed him a foray into the gray world of Soviet education,” 154 now he realized that his mother – the iron lady of the household – was vulnerable too, and so he cried. Thirteen years later, when he is working in Prava for the criminal organisation of The Groundhog, Vladimir relives the traumatic event. After being attacked by skinheads and being threatened by the anti-semite Gusev, his rival, he cannot help but re-imagining what had happened years ago at the Leningrad airport: “‘You’ll be back, Yid,’ the customs agent had said to Mother” 155 . The sixth part of the novel ends there. A bit later in the story, the confrontation

150 Vapnyar, “Tour Guide,” 99 151 Vapnyar, “Tour Guide,” 104 152 RDH , 175 153 RDH , 175 154 RDH , 175 155 RDH , 344

between Vladimir and the skinheads becomes even more serious. Vladimir’s attempts to make them change their minds are so pathetic that they become funny. A real schlemiel is at work here:

“No arabia!” Vladimir shouted, waving his hands dangerously close in the direction of the leader. “America! I am America!” He happily remembered the extremist fervor of some of his Zionist classmates in Hebrew school. “Arabia, tphooo !” He spit – unfortunately on his shoe. “Islams...” He brought a mock trigger to his head and shot himself, “Boom!” although really he ought to have been shooting somewhere else, in the direction of the imaginary Arab, perhaps. 156

Although the description of the ensuing beating is very harsh and vivid, the schlemiel-like performance of Vladimir gives a different dimension to it. The role of the schlemiel is indispensable here. It serves as a therapeutic method for externalizing traumatic feelings concerning anti-Semitism and self-conscioussness of negative Jewish characteristics. By using the schlemiel as someone whose core identity consists, by definition , of being victimized, the traumatic event is rendered less direct, less realistic maybe and less self-pitying; but at the same time, the traumatic feelings are processed literarily as the schlemiel carries his fate without being crushed entirely. Hence, the assertion of a stereotyped, essentialist identity in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook is inscribed in a non-essentialist, performative discourse that aims at the representation of trauma. Moreover, the choice for a ridiculously vulnerable schlemiel stands in the firm Yiddish tradition of laughing your fears and unhappiness away, as Wisse points out: “Yiddish humor is cuttingly sharp; it contains more of harshness than merriment.” 157

Even more interesting, however, is Wisse’s assertion of the schlemiel as a container for “negative qualities of weakness that had to be ridiculed to be overcome.”158 In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , this function of the schlemiel’s essentialized Jewish negativity is very much present. We are then entering Shteyngart’s beloved territory of irony, which (from an analytical point of view) is always hazy because of its many ambiguous meanings. Yet, as I hope to prove, there are some serious arguments for reckoning irony a very powerful factor in the work of Shteyngart – one that explains the schlemiel-like Jewish negativity of the characters better than Rovner’s assumption of a desperate, nostalgic attempt to claim a distinctive Otherness. In his article “Questions of Identity,” Morris Dickstein rightfully remarks that “ The Russian Debutante’s

156 RDH , 420 157 Wisse, Schlemiel , x 158 Wisse, Schlemiel , 5

Handbook is not one but two books, first a sardonic, semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in Queens as the son of recent Russian immigrants [...] What follows is a baroquely plotted tale, not even half serious.” 159 The caesura between the two major parts is indeed striking. Dickstein is right to label the first part featuring Vladimir Girshkin’s life in New York City ‘sardonic’. Although ‘sarcastic’ would be an appropriate term too, I will stick to the more neutral term ‘ironic’. The section in New York can be read as one big parody of the (sub)urban stories of a post-war writer like Philip Roth, where the immigrant has become a member of an ethnic minority within the American (Newark) mainstream and where socio-economic oppositions overshadow the ‘authenticity vs. assimilation’ debate (cf. supra). For example, Vladimir’s relationship with Francesca Ruocco ironically exaggerates the roles of dominance and dependance between a rich, classy, all-assimilated girl and an uncertain, aloof and self-conscious protagonist. In fact, the grotesque love story is a perfect mock of the summer love affair between Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin in Roth’s novella Goodbye, Columbus (discussed earlier). Fran is a fashionable, lively, young Manhattanite by birth and daughter of two rich professors. Like Brenda, Fran seems to feel secure in her high society life (the only difference being that Fran is not of Jewish but of Italian descent). Yet, whereas Roth subtly discloses cracks in Brenda’s ego (for instance, the shame about her ‘Jewish’ nose), Shteyngart satirically inflates the egos of Fran and her family until they explode all over the pages. Fran’s father is a professor, not in an honorable disclipine like literature or history but in “Humor Studies. It’s better than brilliant, it’s thoroughly unexpected!” 160 In an over-dramatic scene, a crying Fran crashes and confesses a secret to Vladimir: “The secret is: I’m really not too bright [...] I’m worse off than you are. At least you have no tangible ambitions.” 161 In the same vein, Vladimir can be seen as a mocking parody of the young intellectal Neil: whereas Neil feels slightly uncomfortable with the luxurious life style of the Patimkins, Vladimir is a totally unsuccessful slacker, a schlemiel, humiliated both by his girlfriend and her parents in the most unimaginable ways. In a supposedly romantic scene, Fran declares to Vladimir: “Do you know why I like you, Vladimir? Have you figured it out yet? I don’t like you because you’re sweet or kind-hearted, or because you’re somehow going to change my world [...] I like you because you’re a small, embarrassed Jew .” 162 Fran’s parents treat Vladimir like the precious pet of their fantastic daughter because he is “imbued with this patience, this

159 Dickstein, 118 160 RDH , 82 161 RDH , 81 162 RDH , 78, my emphasis

superhuman ability to abide... Maybe it’s a Russian trait, queuing for sausages all day long. Ha ha.” 163 Again, this echoes and extrapolates the patronizing attitude of the Patimkins towards Neil. Even on a more explicit level, the parodical effect is obvious in the novel. In the beginning of the story, Vladimir’s best friend Baobab tells him: “All love is socioeconomic. It’s the gradients in status that make arousal possible.”164 The attraction between Neil en Brenda is largely due to this socioeconomic tension between the two. In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , this tension has become ridiculously unbearable. In order to please his girlfriend, Vladimir has to expend over U.S.$3,000 on bar tabs, academic journals, retro lunches and the like in only one month.165 To Vladimir, this is the sign that he cannot cope, that he is not ready to participate in the classy, all-assimilated little world of the Frans in the USA. He decides to emigrate (or remigrate) to Prava, in order to make money in the criminal organisation of the Groundhog (the son of one of his immigrant clients). Once in Prava, however, Vladimir promises himself to change things for the best: “Those brief bouts of idiocy and self-victimization [...] belonged to an earlier Vladimir [...] for whom the world had little use.” 166 All the schlemiel-like traits of Jewish frailty that determined him in New York would now be over and done with. He immediately climbs to a very comfortable position in the criminal organisation and starts a very ambitious pyramid scheme to defraud the would-be intellectual, American expatriate community. He starts dating Morgan, an American girl who he thinks is different than the others: she is honest and sweet, a bit naive perhaps, not a semi-artistic poseur working on her carefully constructed, smooth street credibility like the other expats. “This time around,” it sounds, “ he would take charge of the relationship. He was beyond the ‘appendage’ stage of following Fran around.” 167 His firm intentions, however, do not last. Slowly but surely, Vladimir relapses in his former state of helpless victim, schlemiel and all the other characteristics mentioned above. His boss distrusts him (because he faked a naturalisation ceremony for his father in New York), he gets beaten at the behest of his boss and he has totally misjudged Morgan. Underneath her innocent appearance, Morgan hides many secrets (for example, she is a member of a weird terrorist organization): “ Who are you, Morgan Jenson? Because I think I’ve made a mistake. [...] Once again. On a different continent, but with the same blind, stupid vigor, with the same debilitating faith of the Jew-walking beta immigrant. A mistake.” 168

163 RDH , 96 – 97 164 RDH , 51 165 RDH , 100 166 RDH , 176 167 RDH , 270 168 RDH , 322

The same ironic (or sardonic) exaggeration is also found in Vladimir’s relationship with his mother, the successful business woman desperately pushing her son towards success. She persists in nicknaming him “ Failurchka . Little Failure.” 169 The parental pressure turns into a obsession for Vladimir, who constantly looks at himself through the eyes of his mother: “What would mother think of this clever new venture? Would she be proud? Would she consider his little pyramid scheme a cheap alternative to an MBA?” 170 In short, maybe Shteyngart utters the same accusations as Rovner, but implicitly. Shteyngart creates an überschlemiel , especially in the New York section of the novel, to mock the (literary) tradition of staging a weak, estranged, victimized Jewish protagonist as the epitome of Jewish identity. By making a selective comparison with Roth’s novella Goodbye, Columbus, one can see how The Russian Debutante’s Handbook comments on earlier representations of Jewish identity rather than asserting a “vicarious Jewish distinctiveness” 171 that, according to Rovner, is supposed to rekindle a superficial ethnic shtick in times of ongoing assimilation. The satirical dimension of the story is quintessential for understanding Shteyngart’s identity politics and grasping the text’s hidden meanings and references. Rovner, too, hints at a possible ironic interpretation of the identity questions in the story, but for some reason, he refuses to take it seriously or even to give them serious consideration in his article. For example, after dealing with the self-pitying tone of the new wave of immigrant writers, Rovner remarks that “[ u]nintentionally , perhaps , Shteyngart and Bezmozgis parody previous narratives of Jewish immigration and assimilation.” 172 Rovner’s cautious hedging (cf. emphasis) reveals a weak spot in his discourse. In the case of Bezmozgis, I will not make statements in this respect, but when it comes to Shteyngart, it looks like Rovner has made a concession against his own will. Of course, the parodying effect of the story is too important to be unintentional. Moreover, there is a second ‘flaw’ in Rovner’s article that suggests a pervasive influence of irony and satire on matters of Jewish identity in the novel after all. In one of the last paragraphs, Rovner states that “Shteyngart’s Vladimir Girshkin emerges as a particularly troubling schlemiel – or more accurately, he is troubling because he is a caricature of a schlemiel.” 173 This nuance indirectly points at Shteyngart’s intention not merely to exhibit the Jewish archetype of the schlemiel, but to use it, to rehash it in a caricatural projection that makes readers redefine their expectations and attitudes toward such stereotypes. In his article on recent ‘translingual’ writers of Russian descent, to which I will return later, Adrian Wanner wittily

169 RDH , 16 170 RDH , 366 171 Rovner, 317 172 Rovner, 317, my emphasis 173 Rovner, 323, my emphasis

clarifies that “it seems pointless to accuse a writer of engaging in clichés if the manipulation of clichés is exactly his point,” 174 thus succinctly voicing my problem with Rovner’s conclusions. 175

Now that I have illustrated the performative function of trauma and irony in Shteyngart’s literary discourse, we can link these findings more explicitly to the postmigration concept and its identity politics. It will be recalled that, as a comment on Morris Dickstein’s article, I have claimed that identity informs the migration pattern in Shteyngart’s fiction, and not the other way around. Confronted with the ironic, schlemiel-like configuration of Jewish identity in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , this claim is especially pertinent. It makes clear that postmigration fiction (just like postmemory fiction) should not be perceived as merely a mirror of sociological and cultural circumstances. Vladimir Girshkin’s persona is not – as Rovner suggests – the pinnacle of Jewish Otherness in a society where Jewish difference has become hard to perceive. It is not a display of weakness or victimhood just because of its Jewish heritage. Rather, the traumatic and ironic role of the schlemiel actively fuels Vladimir’s (r)emigration to Eastern Europe and the ensuing identity experiences. One might see the grotesque schlemiel as an excuse to cross that mythical border back to the place where the schlemiels were first called schlemiels. The following quote from The Russian Debutante’s Handbook makes clear the need to induce an identity crisis in order to set up a renegotiation of identities and mentalities (within the postmigration framework):

Well-situated Americans like Frannie and the denizens of his progressive Midwestern college had the luxury of being unsure of who they were, of shuffling through an endless catalog of social tendencies and intellectual poses. But Vladimir Girhkin couldn’t waste any more time. He was twenty-five years old. Assimilate or leave, those were his options. 176

Vladimir’s wanderings show that assumptions about the schlemiel are not universal. At first, Vladimir feels at home in the passe-partout city of Prava: the schlemiel becomes a real hero. The same person seems to have a totally different fate depending on which mentality or national identity he relies on. As Donald Weber points out, “Vladimir, too, would like to chuck his cultural burdens, would like, above all, to overcome the mythic expectations of American

174 Adrian Wanner, “Russian Hybrids: Identity in the Translingual Writings of Andreï Makine, Wladimir Kaminer, and Gary Shteyngart.” Slavic Review 67:3 (2008): 662 – 681. Quote on p. 678 175 In the promo video for Super Sad True Love Story (cf. supra), the same manipulation is going on. By portraying himself as an illiterate moron, Shteyngart smashes the stereotype of the Jew as the serious, intellectual artist. 176 RDH , 83

success.” 177 Exactly by overcoming those expectations and fleeing from the USA, Vladimir becomes successful. Nathalie Friedman makes similar observations concerning that performative identity in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook : “Shteyngart is also less concerned with representing realist details of immigration and assimilation: his novel resembles, and pays homage to, political satires such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels .” 178 A link to such political satires is perhaps the best way to understand what Friedman herself calls “the postmodern flexibility of identity and national consciousness” 179 in Shteyngart’s novel. Indeed, the flexibility of identity activates the flexibility of the story. The postmigration approach generates a consistent evaluation of how questions of identity, satire and migration complement each other in a loose, whimsical narratological structure. Moreover, it offers an alternative to Rovner’s claim that “contemporary American Jewish literature appears to protest these correspondences, often to the point of essentializing Jewish identity.” 180 . The postmigration dimension that I have outlined above proves that the obvious schlemiel-like profile of the protagonist in Shteyngart’s debut does not entail an essentialized, stereotyped Jewish identity politics per se . Grauer also realizes this and indirectly hints at the function of irony: “Recent Jewish American literature that thematizes the search for identity must be read as part of a larger culture that is simultaneously encouraging and suspicious of such gestures.” 181 That ‘suspicion’ is radiated via an ironic approach to Vladimir’s persona in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . The other major touchstone in Grauer’s analysis was the self- consciousness of contemporary Jewish American literature, as “the concerns that we as readers may have about the nature and meaning of identity are reflected explicitly in the literature itself.” 182 The postmigration dimension in Shteyngart’s novel especially allows for a heavy, explicit focus on identity, since assertions of identity actively influence the story and the migration pattern.

Finally, Shteyngart also deals with the topic of Jewish victimhood in a more cultural or political way in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . Near the end of the story, Vladimir visits Auschwitz II- Birkenau. This is a remarkable scene, as it seems to stand outside the ‘natural’ flow of events that Vladimir goes through in Prava. It is safe to presume that the brief excursion to Auschwitz, in

177 Weber, “Permutations,” no pag. 178 Friedman, no pag. 179 Friedman, no pag. 180 Rovner, 321, my emphasis 181 Grauer, 271 182 Grauer, 270

Poland, is added deliberately with a specific intention. Moreover, the scene stands out for its utter seriousness, as if Shteyngart wants to make amends for his otherwise satirical voice. Already at the very start, when Vladimir and his two American friends Morgan and Perry Cohen drive up the Auschwitz parking lot, it is clear that Shteyngart tends to unpack questions of victimhood by placing them in a broader, historical and even ethical-political context. The BMWs of Vladimir and his friends are dubbed “the cars of the perpetrators,” 183 which sets the tone for the ‘clash of identities’ that informs the rest of the scene. Stepping through the infamous gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Vladimir at once turns into a representantive of his race, a 2 nd or 3 rd generation Holocaust survivor. This implies a high degree of victimhood, naturally, but instead of indulging in helplessness, Shteyngart shows how this victimhood is somehow imposed upon Vladimir – and the Jews in general. In his own, typically ironic voice, Shteyngart suggests the hypersensitivity towards Jewish people when it comes to the Holocaust: “A lengthy cloud had passed – the late-winter sun redoubled its efforts, and Vladimir squinted, bringing his hand up to serve as a visor. ‘What are you thinking?’ Cohen said, misinterpreting this gesture for a sign of trauma on Vladimir’s part.” 184 After that, an uneasy confrontation with a group of aged German tourists ensues:

Vladimir heard the singular sound of a zoom lens extending behind him and then the snap of a shutter. He turned. Behind him the tour group was paces away. A ruddy-cheeked middle-aged woman, as tall, thin, and neatly groomed as the poplars that surrounded Birkenau, was scrambling to deposit her camera into her crowded handbag, her eyes darting everywhere except in the direction of Vladimir. She had taken a picture of him! 185

In the eyes of the German tourists, Vladimir, “the Live Jew of Birkenau,” 186 is the living relic of their collective or national crimes. They are ashamed to look him in the eyes and do not know how to behave or to deal with their inherited or vicarious guilt. When asked, in an interview, to tell more about this Auschwitz scene, Shteyngart responded that it was inspired by the extremely careful attitude towards Jewish people that he experienced during his stay in Berlin:

In fact, my books sell less in Germany than in almost any other country. Because I think it’s almost impolite for them to laugh at this kind of stuff. Often I give

183 RDH , 401 184 RDH , 402 185 RDH , 406 – 407 186 RDH , 408

readings in Germany and there’s this very hollow silence, and I think people are wondering, “Should we be laughing? Is that polite? Is that what he wants from us? OK. I will do anything for the Jew! Anything! Whatever he says, whatever he says!” 187

Clearly, the legacy of the Holocaust still remains a very delicate matter in the 21 st century. Not only is it difficult for the so-called perpetrators (or those who feel akin to the perpetrators) to confront Jewish people, it also is embarrassing for Jewish people, as they are unwillingly put in an almost sacred position. As Shteyngart remarks in the same interview: “In a way it’s hard to always be the victim.” 188 The irony of the scene demonstrates the absurdity of that inherited guilt and collective victimhood. First, none of Vladimir’s relatives were killed in the Holocaust. Moreover, the reader knows that Vladimir is not the victim that the German tourists imagine him to be: Vladimir is a member of a criminal organisation and has set up a huge pyramid scheme in order to defraud his fellow-expatriates. Even on the very domain of Auschwitz, that holy territory, Vladimir calls the Groundhog, his mob boss. So apart from filtering Vladimir’s victimhood through a prism of irony, trauma and postmigration, we can also discern a very serious cultural comment on the nature of that victimhood in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . Shteyngart has aptly stretched it so as to demonstrate its insincerity. Doing so, Shteyngart forestalls accusations of unequivocally celebrating an essentialized Jewish victimhood and discredits Rovner’s claim that it is his (Shteyngart’s) intention to portray Vladimir as an untouchable or even ‘programmatic’ victim.

2. NATIONAL IDENTITY AND MULTICULTURALISM IN THE USA

Now that I have explained and illustrated how Shteyngart’s novel The Russian Debutante’s Handbook deals with the issue of ethnic (Jewish) identity, it proves interesting to have a closer look on how that matter is related to the debate on multiculturalism and assimilation in the USA.

187 Shteyngart in Berlinerblau, 20 188 Shteyngart in Berlinerblau, 20

2.1 Dialectics of assimilation

In his article, Rovner also reflects on questions of assimilation. In accordance with his statements regarding vicarious and superficial Jewish identity, he asserts that “[t]he new immigrant chic charts the aftershocks of an assimilation that has already been accomplished.” 189 For Rovner, this explains the waning of the Jewish American novel, as “American Jewish literature is recognizable as such precisely when it reflects the tension between inclusion and exclusion.” 190 What disturbs Rovner most, however, is the dichotomy between difference and assimilation. He mentions two prominent proponents of this radical dichotomy in Jewish cultural studies: the brothers Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin. Rovner dislikes the fact that “Americanization – at least in its liberal guise – is here viewed as a kind of radical hospitality that is eager to devour Jewish culture” 191 and resists the Boyarins’ concept of “a supposed authenticity that has been lost to the triumphs of acculturation and social mobility.” 192 In short, he calls the dichotomy between difference and assimilation (and the essentialized Jewish identity politics that it entails) “clumsy in and of itself.” 193 The truth, Rovner continues, is more complex. In order to make himself clear, he falls back on a concept by Amos Funkenstein: ‘the dialectics of assimilation’ (coined by Funkenstein in an article with the same name). According to Funkenstein, “assimilation and (ethnic) self- assertion are truly dialectical processes” 194 instead of opposites. Rovner applies this concept of dialectism to the context of American multiculturalism:

Proposing and disseminating notions of Jewish difference has become a means of assimilating into an America that celebrates heterogeneity and glamorizes the ethnic chic. Perhaps, then, insisting on Jewish otherness is just a contemporary facet of ongoing Americanization, the latest manifestation of the dialectics of assimilation. 195

To put it bluntly: in a liberal, multicultural, American climate, there has to be something slightly un-American about someone for him or her to be really American; you belong to the majority when you belong to a minority, and when you assert a fragmentary identity. Rovner remarks that

189 Rovner, 320 190 Rovner, 320 – 321 191 Rovner, 321 192 Rovner, 321 193 Rovner, 321 194 Funkenstein in Rovner, 322 195 Rovner, 322

the fiction of the New Immigrant Chic is affected by this paradox, which makes their attempts to “claim a vicarious [and essentialized] Jewish distinctiveness” 196 even more pointless in his eyes. An interesting episode in the novel when it comes to this dialectics of assimilation is Vladimir’s meeting with Perry Cohen, a Jewish American expatriate in the arty-farty milieu of Prava. Perry Cohen is depicted in the story as the ultimate bragging American. The way that he introduces himself to Vladimir is exactly what Rovner aims at when he talks about the assertion of difference as a form of ongoing Americanization. Cohen tells Vladimir his ‘theme’ (“One thing Vladimir had learned from his years of wandering and self-invention was that it was important to have a theme. A coherent story you could riff off when the opportunity presented itself.” 197 ). Cohen’s theme is basically his father’s story, a self-hating Jew who married the daughter of the mayor of an almost entirely Jew-free Iowan town. Upon hearing Cohen’s theme, Vladimir is offended because he thinks that his own history is worse: “Vladimir was ready to attack Cohen with his own background, from the Jew-baiting of Leningrad to his years as a Stinky Russian Bear in Westchester. Assimilation, my ass. What do you know of assimilation, spoiled American pig?” 198 The competition between the two supposed ‘assimilationists’ is a way of showing how American they really are, how they have dealt with their respective assimilation experiences in a successful, individual, American way. If subscribing to Rovner’s logic, one can see that this peculiar form of ethnic self-assertion, only underscores the easy assimilation into the American mainstream. So Rovner sees this process as a failed attempt to achieve a goal that he already disapproved of, as he takes Shteyngart’s ethnic shtick for granted. Although I have discredited Rovner’s ideas regarding the essentialized Jewish identity in Shteyngart’s work, the idea of the dialectics of assimilation that he brings up is actually useful, as it indirectly reminds that the three parts of the Jewish-American-Russian identity compound that is at stake in Shteyngart’s fiction should not be conceived of as three isolated fragments. Rather, those three ‘parts’ are inextricably intertwined: their full meaning is derived from their relation to each other. Hence, the dialectics of assimilation echos the core of the postmigration concept in Shteyngart’s fiction: the performative interaction of identities in an organic, hybrid network.

196 Rovner, 317 197 RDH , 206 198 RDH , 207

2.2 Irony and the immigrant experience

Shteyngart’s ironic voice proves a useful analytical starting point to explore questions of assimilation and national identity too in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . I have read the beginning of the story (in New York City) as a parodic cultural reference to earlier Jewish literature dealing with Jewish identity. When discussing the first part of the story more specifically in terms of assimilation, the same graphic irony surfaces. The situation of Vladimir’s father is a good example:

In the basement, surrounded by plaster dust and loose electrical wires, the doctor [Vladimir’s father] had tried to recreate for himself the rickety village izba where he had spent his childhood: coarse off-white panels lining the walls were supposed to bring to mind the Russian birch; a set of unfinished wooden chairs gathered around a three-legged kitchen table bespoke an admirable poverty. [...] The great warm stove, the centerpiece of his youth, was missing from the ensemble, but what could one do? 199

This absurd, Shteyngartian image, like most other grotesque scenes in Shteyngart’s work, carries a symbolic significance. Vladimir’s father represents the previous generation(s) of immigrants, for whom the immigrant experience was characterized by the impossibility to return to the Old World. For those earlier immigrants, nostalgia was an essential part of their further life in the New World, as it provided the only opportunity to work through the sense of loss and disruption. This situation stands in sharp contrast to that of a 21 st -century immigrant like Vladimir, who makes use of the opportunity to go back and forth between the Old and the New World. In real life, 21 st -century immigrants still experience feelings of nostalgia, of course, and the practical possibility of going back is not always there. But Shteyngart’s postmodern fiction – as said before – does not aim at representing realist details of actual immigration patterns. Rather, the postmigration dimension in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook accounts for the literary transvaluation of the nostalgia factor. Since reflections on identity inform movements of migration in a postmigration framework (and not the other way around), maladjustment to a New World situation does not need to trigger nostalgia as a way of mourning the inevitable, but directly gives shape to an ad hoc immigration in the free world. Vladimir does not need to recreate the Old World in his basement like previous generations of crypto-nostalgic immigrants. His

199 RDH , 127

confusion is at once settled in a postmigration experience, which allows for a renegotiation of identities that were otherwise (in the case of Vladimir’s father) separated by place or time. Furthermore, Vladimir’s father has his own way of looking back on his immigrant experience so far. His categorization of ‘the immigrant’ signals a deep-seated sense of failure: “Because let me tell you this: Contrary to your mother’s refugee charter, it’s all right to be less than your neighbor, to be a beta immigrant here in America where alpha immigrants are the rule.” 200 The opposition between alpha and beta immigrants and its eugenic connotation reminds that the cliché of the hard-working immigrant in America, who goes from rags to riches, is not always valid. Vladimir takes over this idea and realizes that he is a beta immigrant. Right before he leaves for Prava, Vladimir makes the following conclusion of his time in America:

There was nothing more to be done. America, it seemed, was not entirely defenseless against the likes of Vladimir Girshkin. There was a sorting mechanism at work by which the beta immigrant was discovered, branded by an invisible B on his forehead, and eventually rounded up and put on the next plane back to some dank Amatevka. The events of the last few days were no mere coincidence, they were the natural culmination of Vladimir’s thirteen years as an unlikely Yankee Doodle, a sad mark on his Assimilation Facilitator’s record. 201

Almost automatically, Vladimir link his unsuccessfulness in life to his status of immigrant, whereas it might be his nature as a person in general that accounts for a certain weakness or dissatisfaction. Unlike his father, Vladimir has the chance to remigrate (in a postmigration setting) to “the part of the world where the Girshkins were first called Girshkins” 202 in order to check how his national identity, ethnic identity and self-proclaimed unsuccessfulness are related to one another. What is more, Vladimir’s self-flagellation as a beta immigrant carries traces of trauma – or at least of a high pyschological pressure. In America, supposedly the land of opportunities, everyone feels the pressure of making something of his or her life (because that is what America is there for). For an immigrant, however, this pressure of being successful is even harder. Vladimir’s parents have given him the chance to have a better life by escaping Russia, so it would feel like a betrayal or utter ingratitude if he did not seize every opportunity and be a great success. This ‘added pressure’ is an essential part of the immigrant experience and, in a way, resembles the burden of history felt by next-generation Holocaust survivors. In his article on Foer and Krauss,

200 RDH , 128 201 RDH , 169 202 RDH , 170

Codde refers to “what Dina Wardi has described as ‘memorial candles’: next-generation survivors are burdened by the charge to make up for the lives lost during the Holocaust.” 203 Similarly, the immigrant tries to make up for all the missed opportunities and humiliations in the Old World. In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , this cultural phenomenon is expressed by the huge parental pressure on Vladimir. Every year, on his birthday, Vladimir’s mother calls to give him the same speech as the year before: “Your father and I wish you a brilliant future...! Much success...! You’re a talented young man...! We gave you everything as a child...!” 204

2.3 Meta-criticism in the postmigration framework

Ironically, once Vladimir arrives in Prava and mixes up with the Groundhog’s criminal organisation as well as with other American expatriates, he becomes the ultimate American. His relationship with Morgan, a shy, honest, Midwestern, all-American girl, confirms that sense of finally being in the right place with the right person: “And then it occured to him... One word. Normalcy. What they were doing was inherently normal and right.” 205 Also, the Groundhog asks Vladimir to introduce his men to American mentality: “We’re in this... ‘informational age’... we need ‘Americanisms’ and globalisms.’” 206 Part VII of the novel is tellingly called “Westernizing the Boyars,” and refers to Peter the Great, the modern, western-minded Russian tsar who forced the aristocrats to shave their traditional beards. Vladimir tries to do the same: “Remember Peter the Great shaving Eastern beards and disgracing the Boyars? [...] Yes, I suggest you review your history texts, for that is exactly how it will be done.” 207 He wants to convert the Russian gangsters to American business style. After a while, however, Vladimir becomes disillusioned. His newfound balance in Prava disappears when he gets to know the real Morgan. It appears that she is a member of a revolutionary terrorist organization that wants to blow up The Foot, the relic of a huge dynamited statue of Lenin. Other members of the organization include her local friends Tomas and Alpha, who “taught [her] everything [she] know[s] about not being American.” 208 Vladimir feels like he is the loser in the relationship – again. Suddenly he is the normal, American crook who deals drugs and sets up ordinary pyramid schemes while Morgan engages in idealistic,

203 Codde, “History at Bay,” no pag. 204 RDH , 449 205 RDH , 301 206 RDH , 267 207 RDH , 355 208 RDH , 387

politically inspired terrorist plots behind his back. Vladimir’s ‘normalcy’ and Western decadence (compared to Morgan’s unusual occupations) make him feel like a loser, whereas being a normal American was his main objective in the USA. Clearly, Vladimir has not made his mind up.

The novel’s epilogue is remarkable and begs for a closer look. It is 1998 (five years after the events in Prava) and Vladimir lives with Morgan and her family in Cleveland, Ohio. Morgan is expecting their baby and Vladimir is a partner in his father-in-law’s accountancy business. Vladimir “wants to join the simple brotherhood of America’s white men.” 209 Once in a while, his former Prava-like, frantic nature pops up, but to no avail: “Vladimir locks his office door, closes his eyes, and dreams of... A scheme! A provocation! Pyramids! […] But he can’t. It’s all gone, that youthful instinct. This is America, where the morning paper lands on the doorstep at precisely 7:30 A.M. – not the woolly dominion Vladimir once ruled.” 210 Although Vladimir imagines his entire future in Cleveland, he cannot assimilate fully to the brotherhood of America’s white men. He feels like there will always be a distance. The last words of the novel, however, suggest redemption:

And what of this child? Will he live the way his father once did: foolishly, imperially, ecstatically?... No, thinks Vladimir. For he can see the child now. A boy. Growing up adrift in a private world of electronic goblins and quiet sexual urges. Properly insulated from the elements by stucco and storm windows. Serious and a bit dull, but beset by no illness, free of the fear and madness of Vladimir’s Eastern lands. In cahoots with his mother. A partial stranger to his father. An American in America. That’s Vladimir Girshkin’s son.211

The epilogue, in all its seriousness, leads our attention back to Rovner, who argues that Shteyngart’s literature favors an essentialized Jewish identity that marks the protagonist as “inalterably Other.” 212 I have already showed that a postmigration-based approach, as well as the recognition of irony and trauma, discredits Rovner’s accusations. Still, overlooking the novel’s final paragraphs, one must admit that Shteyngart seems to put forward a Vladimir who is essentially Other and unable to assimilate to an ‘all-American’ climate. Vladimir is not an American in America, notwithstanding his efforts. By merging biologically with America (by

209 RDH , 450 210 RDH , 451 211 RDH , 452 212 Rovner, 316

intermarriage) his son can perhaps be the first all-American Girshkin. Rovner also refers to the epilogue to prove his point. He claims that in this scene “Jewish essence is opposed to American essence, though the world of the father is circumscribed by the performance of supremely American rites.” 213 Similar conclusions are found in Sander L. Gilman’s article “Are Jews Multicultural Enough?” 214 Analyzing Shteyngart’s novel from a multicultural perspective, Gilman states that The Russian Debutante’s Handbook “stresses the impossibility of integration” 215 since Vladimir seems to be an outcast everywhere – in New York, in Prava, in Ohio: “The protagonist remains too Russian (and therefore too Jewish) for a multicultural America, even a multicultural America transplanted into the ‘East.’” 216 The epilogue of the story also plays an important role of Gilman’s analysis: “Yet at the end biological hybridity marks the goal of the new Jewish writer. To become an American, one must [...] physically merge with America.” 217 These observations of Jewish-Russian essentialism lead Gilman to conclude that “ The Russian Debutante’s Handbook is in many ways the exemplary antimulticultural novel in its evocation of the multicultural.” 218 Although Gilman and Rovner’s objections make sense at first sight, they fail to take into account other factors that influence the status of assimilation and multiculturalism in the novel’s discourse. As mentioned before, matters of identity are an explicit topic in Shteyngart’s self- conscious, postmodern fiction. Rather than considering a certain assertion of identity (or, for example, the inability of integration into the multiculturalist whole) as a political comment, one should interpret those elements as a comment on commentary: not the American multicultural society is at stake here, but the debate surrounding that multicultural society. Hence, a subtle form of meta-criticism surfaces in the postmigration dimension, which fits in with Grauer’s findings of a self-conscious, non-essential identity politics in contemporary Jewish American fiction. Vladimir’s situation in 1998 should not and cannot be seen as the ending of a natural evolution or the outcome of linear social darwinism. The epilogue only carries its meaning through a mental connection with earlier representations of identity in the postmigration story. For instance, the roles of Morgan and Vladimir shift throughout the story. First, Morgan was the sincere, all-American girl. Then, it turns out that she despises the spoiled American expatriate community and is a member of an idealistic terrorist organization. All of a sudden, Vladimir is the naive American who fails to settle himself properly in that part of the world where the Girshkins

213 Rovner, 323 214 Sander L. Gilman, “Are Jews Multicultural Enough? Late Twentieth- and Early Twenty-First-Century Literary Multiculturalism As Seen From Jewish Perspectives,” Multiculturalism and the Jews , ed. Sander L. Gilman (New York: Routledge, 2006), 179 – 223. 215 Gilman, 205 216 Gilman, 206 217 Gilman, 207 218 Gilman, 207

were first called Girshkins. Finally, in Ohio, he becomes the shy American Jew, assimilated through marriage with Morgan (who is again the all-American wife) but still conscious of his heritage. These postmigration permutations, illustrated by the remarkable dialectics of assimilation described above, shed a whole new light on the Vladimir of 1998. They suggest, ironically, that an essentialized identity is an illusion; that identity is, in Grauer’s words, “formed in specific historical and cultural circumstances, dependent on the social and discursive factors that bring it into being;”219 that the conception of an ‘all-American’ identity is arbitrary and deceptive; that the idea of ‘assimilation versus difference’ is only one way to look at American multicultural society; and that, above all, identity has a performative function: the fact that one is looking for one’s identity, perennially, actually constitutes one’s identity. Shteyngart himself has understood the importance of the identity politics in his work. In his essay “The New Two-Way Street” 220 he says that, in the 21 st century, “the traditional roles taken up by immigrants and the native-born are in flux.” 221 The postmigration permutations in his fiction indeed offer a thorough contemplation of those roles in flux. In the same essay, Shteyngart also states that he wants to get rid of the uniform ‘melting pot’ conception: “The melting pot has given way to a complicated fusion cuisine, one that may leave a strange taste on the traditional American palate.” 222 The epilogue of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook may well be seen as an ironic repudiation of that traditional American palate and its implications of total inclusion by assimilation or exclusion by difference. Shteyngart testifies that when he arrived in the USA in 1980, “assimilation was a clear-cut proposition. Where you came from was wrong and America would set you straight: Assimilate and live!”223 That is exactly the bittersweet situation of Vladimir in 1998. Shteyngart suggests that such a conception of assimilation is hopelessly outdated and ineffective by ventilating thoughts on the new American fusion cuisine in his postmigration fiction. Shteyngart’s novel does not stress “the impossibility of integration,” 224 like Gilman argues, but it indirectly and ironically hints at new forms of integration that urge “native- born Americans [...] to assimilate to a new country as well.” 225

219 Grauer, 271 220 Gary Shteyngart, “The New Two-Way Street,” Reinventing the Melting Pot , ed. Tamar Jacoby (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 285 – 292 221 Shteyngart, “New Two-Way Street,” 287 222 Shteyngart, “New Two-Way Street,” 287 223 Shteyngart, “New Two-Way Street,” 287 224 Gilman, 205 225 Shteyngart, “New Two-Way Street,” 292

V. THE GLOBAL VILLAGE OF ABSURDISTAN

[ In this chapter, I will discuss Shteyngart’s second novel, Absurdistan . First, I will focus on matters of personal ethnic and national identity. Then I will examine how these matters are renegotiated in the postmigration setting of the story. Finally, I will show how the political dimension of the novel overclasses the suggestive meta-criticism in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . The explicit and implicit references to existing institutions, persons and events gradually turn the story into a rather unambiguous political pamphlet. ]

According to Shteyngart, the identity of America depends on its position in the world in general. A focus on the experience of the immigrants, the “global citizens of an increasingly borderless world,” 226 is a perfect way to compare and confront various identities and mentalities that give shape to that new borderless world. The postmigration framework, with its ad hoc juxtaposition of identities, allows for a literary representation of eroding borders. Whereas The Russian Debutante’s Handbook mainly focuses on the personal identity of the protagonist Vladimir Girshkin, Shteyngart’s second novel shows a much broader scope. In Absurdistan , questions of Jewish identity are embedded in a framework that deals more directly with the politics of the world: national identity, migration, religion and the evaporation of cultural borders and of ideological oppositions in the post-Cold War era are all interrelated in the novel. Also, the place of action – the republic of Absurdsvanï – is even more distanced from reality than the cloned city of Prava (Prague) in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . This, in a way, increases the allegorical dimension of the story and even suggests a roman à clef . Yet, the implication of existing companies and persons like Halliburton and Dick Cheney makes clear that Shteyngart aims at a rather direct political message alongside more general renegotiations of ethnic and national identity in a postmigration literary framework. Both preoccupations are of interest to us.

226 Shteyngart, “New Two-Way Street,” 290

1. THE NATIONAL SHTICK

Whereas Vladimir in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook was the sardonic parody of the victimized schlemiel-Jew, Misha in Absurdistan is the caricatural, stereotyped American. Misha, the son of a very rich oligarch, thinks of himself as “an American impounded in a Russian’s body.” 227 He is “an incorrigible fatso,” 228 craves American “ghetto tech, a hybrid of Miami bass, Chicago ghetto tracks, and Detroit electronica,” 229 has many American friends who all nickname him ‘Snack Daddy’, has studied the liberal arts of Multicultural Studies at an American university, his girlfriend is an undereducated Afro-American girl from the ghetto and he is obsessed with mental health and psychoanalysis, up to the point of calling his psychiatrist every time he feels slightly unhappy. The fact that Misha is denied re-entrance to the USA in the beginning of the story – because his father killed an Oklahoman businessman – is a disaster for Misha. Misha’s attitude towards his Jewish identity, on the other hand, is ambiguous. He asserts a strange kind of ironic, superficial pride for his Jewish heritage. His improvised rap sessions are a lovely example: “ My name is Vainberg / I like ho’s / Sniff’em out / Wid my Hebrew nose”230 Yet, his overall opinion on Jewish religion and culture is rather negative. In the beginning of the novel, Misha declares that he is a “deeply secular Jew who finds no comfort in either nationalism or religion.” 231 Being a staunch defender of multiculturalism, Misha has adapted the ideal of (typically American) personal freedom and individuality. A remarkable scene is when Misha notices an orthodox Hasid Jew during a flight to Absurdistan. Misha is at once distrustful: “He was in his thirties, scraggly-bearded and pimpled, as are they all, with red eyes round as coins. [...] I doubted he had actually bought a first-class ticket, this citizen of the Eternal Shtetl , so perhaps some kind of upgrade scheme was in effect. You never know with these people.” 232 The Hasid Jew gets into an argument with a stewardess over the certification of his kosher meal and Misha becomes increasingly angry with him:

Would it be eliminationist of me to say that I wanted to kill him? Are there certain feelings that, as a Jew, I may safely harbor in my fat heart that a non-Jew may not? Would it really be self-hatred to despise this man with whom I shared nothing more than a squirrelly strand of DNA? 233

227 ABS , 14 – 15 228 ABS , 3 229 ABS , 5 230 ABS , 6 231 ABS , vi 232 ABS , 106 233 ABS , 107

Misha even directly attacks the Hasid Jew and accuses him of asocial, racist behaviour. As he gets more and more agitated, the real reason of his wrath surfaces: “’Because of you, I am not a man,’ I spat at the Hasid as I walked past his row. ‘You took the best part of me. You took what mattered.’”234 Misha refers to a rather traumatic experience that he had years ago: his (belated) circumcision. At the age of 18, Misha is sent to America by his father to go to college and, first of all, to finally get that circumcision that Misha’s late mother never wanted her son to have. The scene of the circumcision (performed in a questionable municipal hospital under the auspices of Hasid Jews) is written in a truly Shteyngartian fashion. Not only does Shteyngart portray the Hasid as a bunch of alienated, chaotic fanatics, he also desecrates one of the most weighty Jewish rituals, the bris :

The hum gradually resolved itself into a chorus of male voices singing what sounded like: “A humus tov , a tsimmus tov , a mazel tov , a tsimmus tov , a humus tov , a mazel tov , a humus tov , a tsimmus tov , hey hey, Yisroel .” [...] (Later, in fact, I found out those weren’t the words to the song at all.) 235

Misha desperately tries to get out of the situation, but to no avail, and the circumcision is performed. Yet, his warning that “eighteen is too old for cutting the dick” 236 proves right, as the infection of his “ crushed purple bug ”237 sets in the same night. For the rest of his life, Misha is bound to live with a severely mutilated member. Hence his instinctive hate for orthodox Jews and religion in general. Like many other grotesque scenes in Shteyngart’s work, the circumcision has a symbolic meaning, as it accounts for some of Misha’s psychological characteristics. Misha suffers from a freudian-like regression and sometimes behaves like a manchild. This trait surfaces repeatedly. The behaviour towards his psychiatrist, dr. Levine, is a fine example. Misha’s dependency on the man is outrageous. The Shteyngartian hyperbole in the following quote illustrates Misha’s obsession for dr. Levine:

[Dr. Levine] has the boxy chest of an athletic twenty-five-year-old and a tight, if slightly feminine, behind. I am not a homosexual by any stretch, and yet I have dreamed many times of making passionate love to his ass, my big body draped

234 ABS , 108 – 109 235 ABS , 20 – 21 236 ABS , 22 237 ABS , 23

over his smaller one, my hands rubbing his sweet gray-bearded muzzle. [...] “I really love you, Doctor...” 238

Likewise, Misha’s relationship with his girlfriend Rouenna is tainted with a similar freudian perversity, as if Misha in the first place longs for a caring mother figure. The first time they had sex, right after they met in New York City, already illustrates the balance of power in their strange relationship. Misha is reluctant to get naked at first, because he is ashamed of his heavily mutilated penis, but Rouenna makes him feel at ease:

“Your boy too big for me?” Rouenna asked. “It’s never too big for mommy.” [...] I fought with all my mass, but Rouenna overpowered me. My underwear ripped in two. The crushed purple insect shyly drew its head back into its neck. [...] But Rouenna didn’t put my khui [penis] in her mouth. She turned it over, found the most hideous spot on its underbelly – a vivid evocation of the bombing of Dresden – and, for the next 389 seconds (a handy clock helped me count), imparted upon it a single, silent kiss.

The mentioning of ‘mommy’ in the scene only adds up to the excessively distorted sexual and emotional orientation of Misha. The traumatic event of the circumcision is crucial in this respect. Touched in the core of his manhood, Misha seems unable to assert his adulthood to the fullest. One does not need to see the circumcision as a specific cause of his vulnerability as such, but at least it is emphasized as the symbol of his increased vulnerability. Fact is that Misha’s hatred for Judaism is rooted in that particular traumatic experience, as the confrontation with the Hasid Jew on the airplane makes abundantly clear. To some extent, Absurdistan has a lot in common with The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . Both Misha and Vladimir are protagonists who cannot stand their ground in their respective milieus and take refuge in Eastern Europe. Yet, whereas Shteyngart stages Vladimir as the ironic caricature of the schlemiel by hinting at a stereotyped Jewish victimhood, Misha is depicted as a grotesque parody of the self-hating Jew. His anti-Jewish sentiments prompt Misha to embrace everything that is American and liberal. This turns Misha into a larger-than-life stock figure that embodies and inflates American mentality, up to the point of reducing it to boisterous decadence with huge insecurity and desorientation underneath. This national shtick , if I can call it that, is the counterpart of the ethnic shtick of Vladimir in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook .

238 ABS , 60 – 61

For Misha, the assertion of an American identity also serves to make sense of his identity as a Russian or a Jew. As said before, the different ‘parts’ of the Jewish-American-Russian identity compound in Shteyngart’s work derive their meaning from the way that they are interrelated. In the first place, the American shtick is a personal issue for Misha, who tries to use his American identity as a way of rebellion and individuality. The conversation between Misha and his father before he is sent to America already indicates the way that Misha tends to embrace American identity so as to free himself from his fate as a Russian Jew:

“Idiot,” Papa said, shaking his double-jointed nose at me. “You’ll never be an American. You’ll always be a Jew. How can you forget who you are? You haven’t even left yet. Jew, Jew, Jew.” I had heard from a distant cousin in California that one could be both an American and a Jew and even a practicing homosexual in the bargain, but I didn’t argue. 239

The circumcision brings about a final breach of trust between Misha and his father, which leads Misha to be more American than ever. However, the national shtick also shows itself on a more cultural or political level, as Russian identity is redefined (or re-imagined) in terms of Americanisms. A good example is Misha’s relationship with Rouenna. Misha says that he has a penchant for Afro-American people because “it seemed that, like my Soviet compatriots, they were making an entire lifestyle out of their defeat.”240 Shteyngart suggests that while Russia has its Jews, America has its black people. By identifying himself with Afro-Americans, and by dating a black girl, Misha recognizes and transposes his inner conflicts as a Russian Jew to an American context. Misha’s decision to start a charity project for Russian kids called ‘Misha’s Children’, for instance, clearly echoes this urge to Americanize. Not to Americanize Russia as such, but to Americanize his own way of looking at Russian society or to undermine fate. That is a hard task:

I asked myself, If I were to give each of them [kindergarten pupils] US$100,000, would their lives change? Would they learn to become human beings upon completing their adolescence? Would the virus of our history be kept at bay by a cocktail of dollar-denominated humanism? Would they become, in a sense, Misha’s Children? But even with my largesse, I could see

239 ABS , 17 240 ABS , 19

nothing positive befalling them. A temporary respite from alcoholism, harlotry, heart disease, and depression. Misha’s Children? Forget it. 241

Eventually, Misha does set up the project, but his pessimistic musings concerning the fate of the Russian children remain, and can be extrapolated to the future of Russian society as a whole. Shteyngart himself has made some comments in interviews that point in this direction. According to him, “at this point, certainly in terms of culture, there’s a huge permeation of American culture in Russia and other countries,” 242 and what it comes down to is the fact that “Russian consumerism wants to be American consumerism.”243 Yet, Absurdistan suggests that this evolution is catastrophic for Russia, since a mere influx of material wealth is not enough to transform a communist and totalitarian society to a Western civil society. In a sense, Russia’s major problem in Absurdistan is the American shtick : post-Soviet Russia indulges in Western music, American fast food and material extravagances which are stereotypically American, but it has not been able to adapt fundamental values such as freedom and democracy. This is due to the relatively peaceful and transitory nature of the changes that Russia went through in the beginning of the 1990s, which allowed for the elite of the old regime to reinvent themselves in the new – a former apparatchik could become president. The Russian oligarchy, which includes Misha’s father, is the pinnacle of these evolutions. All things considered, Misha’s thougths at seeing those Russian children are very symbolic. No matter how much money or material wealth you pump into Russia, it will not change the real social problems or the mentalities among the population. Russia’s ambiguous ‘old-versus-new’ situation is hinted at repeatedly in the novel. For instance, Misha’s status as the son of a wealthy oligarch somehow reminds of Russian aristocracy from before the Russian Revolution. The way that Misha treats his personal manservant Timofey betrays an uncorrupted form of serfdom:

I rolled down to the cellar and found my manservant, Timofey, sleeping on a soiled mattress beside my prized German laundry machine. [...] I thought about throwing a shoe at him, but instead gently pushed him in the stomach with my foot. “Up, up, up,” I growled. [...] “Please forgive me, batyushka ,” Timofey murmured out of instinct, trying to shake off a deep slumber. “Timofey’s just a sinner like the rest of them.” 244

241 ABS , 37 242 Sara Brown and Armando Celayo, “I Am the World, I’ll Eat the World.” Interview in World Literature Today , 83:2 (2009): 29 – 32. Quote on p. 30 243 Brown and Celayo, 32 244 ABS , 80

Another example of Russia’s ‘unenlightened’ social climate is the widespread corruption, inherited from the Soviet apparatchiks . When Captain Belugin, the police officer who is to investigate the murder of Misha’s father, comes to inform Misha that he knows the murderers, he makes clear that he refuses to take action against them, because Oleg the Moose, who ordered the hit, is an important oligarch and “a childhood friend of the governor of St. Petersburg.”245 The fact that the murder is taped by an eye-witness makes no difference. What is more, Captain Belugin offers Misha to arrange a deal with Oleg: twenty-five million dollars for Misha’s father’s assets and three million for the murder. Belugin admits, unabashed: “My commission is fifteen percent. That’s the standard commission around the world.” 246 Absurdistan suggests that corruption and decadence in post-Soviet Russia are even worse than before, because now there is more wealth and more money that allows for bribery and extortion. There is a scene in the novel that succinctly summarizes this. Back in college in the USA, Misha’s American friend Alyosha-Bob throws all of his stuff (his stereo, computer, records,...) out of the window because he wants to be a real Russian. When Misha points out that “real Russians love all the things that you have trown out,” Alyosha-Bob is confused because he has “been associating Russian life with spirituality.” Misha’s reply: “Well, some of us are believers, but mostly we just want things.” 247

Finally, Misha’s decision to take refuge in the Republic of Absurdsvanï is the result of his undeniable status as an outcast: Misha is, in a way, triply exiled. He is denied entrance to the USA, he cannot cope in the Russian dog-eat-dog world, and he renounces Jewish community life. In Absurdistan, Misha attempts to get hold of a Belgian passport so he can spend his days in Brussels, the center of European integration and a model of multiculturalism.

2. POSTMIGRATION IDENTITY PERMUTATIONS

Now that I have outlined the assertions of personal, ethnic and national identity, I can discuss how they are subsequently brought up, confronted and reinterpreted in the postmigration setting of Absurdsvanï in the novel. As said before, Absurdistan has a broader scope than The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . In Absurdistan , matters of national identity and mentality, along with the

245 ABS , 40 246 ABS , 41 247 ABS , 177

identity of the world as a global village, somehow overshadow matters of personal identity or the self-monitoring of the protagonist. This shift in Shteyngart’s voice is consequently (and ironically) sustained, up to the point that Misha en Rouenna’s break-up is presented as a global-cultural disequilibrium. Incited by a liberal-minded immigrant professor called Jerry Shteynfarb (cf. infra), Rouenna sends a scathing mail to Misha:

He says yes thats true but that you always veiwed me from the Position of a Colonialist Oppresor. You always secretly look down at me. [...] Its always you you you. [...] Also he says its wrong when you an your friend alosha try to do your rapping and pretend your from the ghetto because thats also being a Colonialist. He gave me a book by Edward Said, which is super hard, but its worth it. 248 [sic]

Misha’s liberal-minded attitude turns against him. The mentioning of Edward Said, a cultural critic famous for his ideas on postcolonialism and Western perception of the East, confirms that the binary opposition between the West and the East (in terms of cultural and political values) is an important factor in the novel. Shteyngart’s conception of the new immigrants as the “global citizens of an increasingly borderless world,” 249 as he formulates it himself in one of his essays, very much applies to Misha Vainberg in the novel. As a matter of fact, the postmigration framework in Absurdistan serves as the perfect epitome of that borderless world. Issues of political and cultural globalism and multiculturalism are questioned in the postmigration setting and are mediated through the eyes of the immigrant protagonist, who, apart from internalizing those issues to make up his personal situation as an Americanized Russian Jewish immigrant, rationalizes them, above all, to adjust some fundamental assumptions regarding global society in the 21 st century.

Upon arrival in the Republic of Absurdsvanï (at the Caspian sea), Misha is introduced to the particulars of the country. There are two major characteristics on which Shteyngart seems to put emphasis: ethnic oppositions and a pervasive American influence. The population of Absurdistan is divided into two ethnic groups: the Svanï (making up the majority) and the Sevo. The differences between the two are commented upon throughout the story, but the more we get to know about the ethnic oppositions, the more it becomes clear that, as one of Misha’s Sevo friends puts it, “Svanï, Sevo [...] are the same people. The distinctions are only useful for the

248 ABS , 78 – 79 249 Shteyngart, “New Two-Way Street,” 290

ruling class. [...] So that they can better oppress us!” 250 Indeed, on a political level, the ethnic distinctions are still of some use, but for the people, they have become practically irrelevant: both people speak the same language, have the same Orthodox Christian religion and are hardly recognizable as Sevo or Svanï (except for the fact that the Sevo cross has a reversed footrest as compared to the Svanï cross). Obviously, Shteyngart does all that he can to ridiculize the traditional ethnic oppositions in a manner that fits him best: the satirical grotesque. In chapter 24 of the novel (“Why the Sevo and Svanï Don’t Get Along”) a tour guide tells Misha the history of the Svanï and Sevo people. Surprisingly, “the Sevo and Svanï started out as one people,” 251 but the holy Saint Sevo the Liberator initiated the schism after he had a vision. The whole history is narrated in a burlesque fashion, featuring a stoned Saint Sevo and an equally drugged Jesus who commands Saint Sevo to “fuck every underage cutie in town. I’m talking, like, sodomy here.” 252 Saint Sevo sets to work and, after a series of mythical plot twists, becomes the founder of the Sevo community. Misha remarks that “[t]his has all sorts of crucial theological implications , none of which I can remember.” 253 The differences between the Sevo and the Svanï, as well as the importance of ethnic identity in Absurdsvanï, were already discredited, but are now completely mocked. Furthermore, Shteyngart’s preoccupation with the matter of ethnic oppositions in Absurdistan is not restricted to the Sevo and the Svanï. Throughout the story, references are made to several countries that have to deal with ethnic fragmentation among their population. The situation of Israel, for example, is brought up explicitly, as Misha gets appointed Minister of Multicultural Affairs in order to establish bonds between the Sevo and Zionists (cf. infra). But Shteyngart also aims at less obvious targets. The reason that Misha travels to Absurdistan in the first place is to buy a Belgian passport. The choice for Belgium is not a coincidence. Already since its creation in 1830, and until this very day, the country’s politics are increasingly dominated by ethnic oppositions between a Dutch speaking majority (the Flemish) and a French speaking minority (the Walloons). Yet, despite the internal problems, the country has managed to become a prosperous nation, famous for its peaceful consensus decision-making, and has played a leading role in the process of European integration. For Misha, Belgium might be the perfect climate to cultivate his liberal and multicultural ideas. Shteyngart subtly hints at yet another country that is (in)famous for ethnic heterogeneity: Rwanda. As Misha’s tour guide points out, “the Svanï have been farmers and herders, and [the Sevo] have been the traditional merchant class. [...] [The Sevo] are cosmopolitans trying to cuddle up to the West, while the Svanï screw sheep and pray for

250 ABS , 132 251 ABS , 191 252 ABS , 191 253 ABS , 192

salvation.” 254 The socio-economic opposition between a majority of supposedly ‘backward’ farmers and a minority of priviliged merchants very much resembles the traditional situation of the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda, where tensions amounted to a bloody civil war in 1994. So far, however, the political and social situation in Absurdsvanï looks good for Misha. The ethnic oppositions have eroded and, what is more, the presence of a vast American (or Western) capitalist culture makes him feel secure. Gorbigrad, the country’s capital, is packed with perfumeries, outlet shops, fancy hotels and skycrapers of oil companies and other multinationals. The Americanized, multicultural society suggests the possibility of a global world at ease with all the distinct influences that inform it. In his luxurious hotel room, Misha enjoys his newfound Eden:

[T]he next thing I knew, I was looking at a happy Western parody of a modern home, with marble countertop on everything from the desks to the nightstand to the bathroom sink to the coffee table. For a second I thought I had actually arrived in Europe, so I muttered the word “Belgium,” fell to my knees, doubled over, enjoyed immensely the feeling of plush carpeting enveloping my breasts and cradling my stomach, and bade the waking world goodbye. 255

The American influence serves as a stabilizing factor in Absurdistan because it generates a large portion of the nation’s material wealth, which counterbalances ideological frictions. Yet, the peaceful co-existence does not last. When it is announced that the plane of Georgi Kanuk, the Svanï dictator, is shot down by Sevo rebels, a hazy civil war breaks out. 256 A crucial oil pipeline seems to be the reason of the conflict, but no one really knows what will happen next. As times passes, Misha feels more and more attracted to the SCROD, a Sevo nationalist organization. His attitude towards their cause is ambiguous. On the one hand, Misha realizes that the combatant SCROD nationalists represent everything that he, as a liberal-minded, multiculturalist individual, is supposed to object to. He realizes that the Sevo nationalists are “the same assholes who ran everything before. It took them two seconds to switch from the hammer and sickle to Christ’s True Footrest.” 257 He also realizes that their discourse of freedom and democracy is a treacherous, populist mutilation of the true American moral liberalism that he

254 ABS , 193 255 ABS , 120 256 Again, this reminds of the outbreak of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when the airplane carrying the Rwandan President Junvénal Habyarimana and the Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira (both Hutu) was shot down (supposedly by Tutsi rebels). 257 ABS , 229

absorbed during his years in college: “I knew I was getting into something ugly, or at least morally taxing, but I did nothing. I let it happen. Slowly, and then not so slowly, I was being pulled toward the SCROD.” 258 But on the other hand, Misha feels the need to accomplish something real, for the first time in his life. The little boy inside, who has always dominated Misha’s emotional life, pops up again. In an utterly freudian and regressive scene, Misha takes a bath and imagines his late father washing him as if he were a child. It is here that Misha decides to give in to the Sevo nationalists. He wants to make his daddy proud:

“I want to believe in something too, Papa,” I said. “Just like you believed in Israel. I want to help the Sevo people. I’m not stupid. I know they’re no good. But they’re better than their neighbors. [...] Will you love me more if I do something important with my life?” 259

So Misha finally turns to the SCROD. His major task is to find sympathy for the Sevo cause in Israel and, consequently, the USA. At first, Misha is reluctant to suck up to Israel, being “a deeply secular Jew who finds no comfort in either nationalism or religion,” 260 but the Sevo leader knows exactly how to handle him: “‘Your father would know what to say,’ Mr. Nanabragov told me.”261 However, the title of ‘Minister of Sevo-Israeli Affairs’ does not appeal to Misha: he continues to distinguish himself from the “bearded Jews you see at the Wailing Wall,”262 who are, in his opinion, “fairly second-rate Jews.” 263 . Instead, he proposes the office of ‘Minister of Multicultural Affairs’. Although the job description remains pretty much the same – getting the attention of Israel and the USA – Misha suddenly feels as if the whole venture fits in with his liberal, multicultural, pacifist world view:

I would be in charge of minority relations. I would unite all the different people living in Absurdsvanï. And together we would hold festivals and conferences almost every day. We’d celebrate our identities. It would look very good in the eyes of the world. I would be a uniter .264

258 ABS , 230 259 ABS , 236 260 ABS , vi 261 ABS , 225 262 ABS , 251 263 ABS , 251 264 ABS , 251

Misha soon realizes that the best way to attract Israeli attention and to strengthen Sevo- Israeli ties is to involve the deux ex machina of Jewish identity politics: the Holocaust. In chapter 35 of the novel, ironically called “A Modest Proposal,”265 Misha lists a number of meticulous plans for a new, innovative Holocaust museum, “The Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies, aka the Museum of Sevo-Jewish Friendship,” 266 even though the Nazis never reached Absurdsvanï. In his article on Shteyngart (and other ‘Russian hybrids’), Wanner states that “Vainberg’s mock grant application for an ‘Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies’ is a satirical spoof of the American ‘Holocaust industry.’” 267 Indeed, in Absurdistan , Shteyngart not only tears down the holy house of Jewish religion, he also sardonically attacks the political and cultural deployment of the Holocaust as a strategic tool for facilitating Jewish / Zionist interests and ambitions today. For Shteyngart, this ironic approach towards the memory of the Holocaust in his novel is a way of satirically liberating Jewish identity from its taint of victimhood. Generally the same happened in the Auschwitz scene in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , though there it was much subtler and more ‘respectful’ towards those Jewish people who actually consider the memory of the Holocaust a weighty, serious element of their Jewish identity. The confrontation with the embarrassed German tourists during Vladimir’s visit to the concentration camp suggests that, in Shteyngart’s own words, “it’s hard to always be the victim,”268 and that the aureole of victimhood can be absurd at times – considering that Vladimir is a swindler and not a victim at all. In Absurdistan , Shteyngart again shatters the Jewish fetish for ethnic defensiveness and self-victimization. In his project overview, Misha explains the aims of the new Holocaust museum. He starts by invoking the assimilationist threat that I have mentioned in the very beginning of this thesis: “The greatest danger facing American Jewry is our people’s eventual assimilation into the welcoming American fold and our subsequent extinction as an organized community.” 269 In order to avoid that, it is essential that young Jews do not engage in intermarriage with non-Jewish people. Hence, organized Jewry has to find a way of infusing youngsters with guilt and encouraging Jewish sentiments (“subtext: six million died an you’re twirling around a bar stool with some hazzar ?”270 ) According to Misha’s plan, the Holocaust is the most effective option: “The Holocaust, when harnessed properly as a source of guilt, shame and

265 The title refers to a satirical essay written by Jonathan Swift in 1729. Swift suggests to deal with overpopulation and food shortage in Ireland by selling poor children as food for rich people. 266 ABS , 268 267 Wanner, 676 268 Shteyngart in Berlinerblau, 20 269 ABS , 268 270 ABS , 270

victimhood, can serve as a remarkable tool for Jewish Continuity.” 271 Yet, the choice for the Holocaust poses some challenges, as traditional institutes like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Yad Vashem are hopelessly hackneyed. So the new Sevo-Israeli Holocaust Institute has to be “fresh, vibrant and sexy.” 272 Misha’s ideas are hilarious and scathing at the same time. He suggests an educational program called ‘Holocaust for Kidz’ to inspire the youngest; a ‘Tent of Consent’ near the museum, where “Continuity gets its capital C” 273 and Jews of reproductive age can mingle to secure a Jewish offspring; and a “Think It Can’t Happen Again?” annex:

This daring conceptual space will feature dozens of French Arab youths throwing rocks at passing museumgoers, threatening, “Six million more,” while passive French intellectuals stand by in the shadows, smoking and drinking, smoking and drinking. For safety reasons, the “rocks” will be made of 100 percent recyclable paper, and the French Arab youths will be caged. 274

So although Misha has always distanced himself from organized Jewry, he decides to commit himself to the preservation of the Chosen People. It turns out that his theoretical world view and his self-assertion as an independent cosmopolitan liberal, when put into practice in a setting that unites all sorts of influences, does not stand. Misha has to renegotiate his self-image constantly due to the happenings in Absurdistan. Instead of staging such identity permutations in a classic ‘Old World to New World’ immigrant experience of a protagonist who adjusts his identity and his expectations as he explores his new American environment, Shteyngart resorts to the increasingly globalized and borderless world to set up a postmigration experience that encompasses those permutations in an experimental way. Naturally, the ‘makeshift’ postmigration setting of Absurdsvanï is very much influenced and characterized by the nature of the identity politics in the novel. The major touchstones formulated by Grauer apply to Absurdistan as well. The self-consciousness of literature, with respect to questions of identity, is a crucial factor in the poetics of identity of the novel. Misha’s Holocaust project is a clear example, as it allows Shteyngart to comment freely and explicitly in his work on the nature and significance of Jewish identity: “Identity politics are a great boon to our quest for Continuity. Identity is born almost exclusively out of a nation’s travails. For us [...] this means Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust.” 275 In a truly postmodern fashion, one can even

271 ABS , 269 272 ABS , 269 273 ABS , 271 274 ABS , 271 275 ABS , 270

read Shteyngart’s explicit comments on identity as a comment on his own work. After all, he too drags the Holocaust in his fiction. So gradually, a postmodern carousel of irony, self-reference or meta-reference, and performative identity starts spinning and disorients every analysis of the poetics of identity in the work. A close reading of Absurdistan uncovers the non-essentialist nature of identity in the novel and exemplifies Grauer’s conclusion that contemporary Jewish American fiction “should be examined less for its coherence as a body of literature defined by an identity as for its focus on it.” 276 Moreover, the metafictional dimension in Absurdistan takes the literary self-consciousness a step further. The novel features two remarkable side characters: Jerry Shteynfarb (professor and author of The Russian Arriviste’s Hand Job and a conceited, “upper-middle-class phony who came to the States as a kid and is now playing the professional immigrant game”277 ) and Vladimir Girshkin. Although these two characters do not really actively participate in the story, their appearance is typical of Shteyngart’s identity politics. In his analysis of Absurdistan , Wanner points out:

By ironizing his own identity as a translingual writer, Shteyngart aims to forestall any potential criticism that he himself might be playing a “professional immigrant game.” His implicit response, though, is not to deny the charge but to point out that all literature is a game of identities. 278

The assumption that, basically, all literature is a game of identities is especially true for postmodern fiction. In Absurdistan , Shteyngart’s two alter egos (Jerry Shteynfarb and Vladimir Girshkin) serve as a powerful reminder of the sovereignty of identity in his work. The mediation of literature, yet another one of Grauer’s touchstones, is also found in Absurdistan . In the prologue, the narrator (Misha) starts by saying: “This is a book about love. The next 338 pages are dedicated with that cloying Russian affection that passes for real warmth [...].”279 Throughout the novel, similar metafictional or self-referential comments are made by Misha. They invigorate the literary postmodern climate that allows for direct, explicit identity permutations in a postmigration framework.

276 Grauer, 270 277 ABS , 81 278 Wanner, 678 279 ABS , v

In the next part of this chapter, I will discuss how the postmigration dimension of the novel gradually opens up to comment on the identity of the globalized world and eventually fades into a direct political accusation.

3. POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS

3.1 All war is socio-economic

In order to investigate the entire scope of Shteyngart’s postmigration construction, we must get back to the story. Near the end of the story, Misha begins to feel very suspicious of the situation in Absurdsvanï in general and the role of the SCROD, his employer, in particular. For instance, Misha notices that, right after the civil war broke out, all personnel of the major oil companies in Absurdsvanï (BP, Shell, Chevron, ...) left the hotels and were replaced by people of Halliburton (an American oilfield services corporation) and, more specifically, KBR (an engineering and private military contracting company and a subsidiary of Halliburton). 280 Misha does not know what to think of the presence of KBR staff. Another revelation that arouses his suspicion is the bombing of the capital: Misha finds out that the bombing is actually staged by the SCROD to attract more media attention:

“It’s all worked out with the federal forces. In the morning our Ukrainian friends shell the Svanï parts of Gorbigrad, and in the afternoon they go for the Sevo districts. We take turns, see? But to outsiders, it looks like a real war. Like we’re tearing each other apart. Help, help, U.S.A. Save our oil.”281

At first, Misha is shocked at the treacherous, Machiavellian attitude of his boss; moreover, he feels responsible because he once told his boss that the war is not exciting enough, probably, to attract America’s attention. So Misha is entangled in a vile, war-mongering project that totally violates his American principles of liberal democracy. Yet, those principles seem to have lost their significance. Misha gets over them pretty quickly, reassuring himself that “[t]here was a bit of

280 In 2007, a year after the publication of Absurdistan , Halliburton – officially – broke ties with KBR. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton 281 ABS , 255

American athletic wisdom that summed it up nicely: ‘No pain, no gain.’” 282 He subscribes to the good old Soviet practice of corruption and decadence described earlier and continues to work for the SCROD. After a while, however, when violence increases and international attention for the civil war remains small, Misha is told the truth about the goings-on in Absurdistan by an Israeli Mossad agent. As it turns out, the war is not about oil at all: by the end of the year, Absurdsvanï’s hydrocarbon reserves will be tapped out entirely. So Georgi Kanuk (the Svanï President) and Nanabragov (the Sevo leader) had to find another source of income. They made a deal with Halliburton and KBR. If they could manage to get the U.S. army in Absurdistan, say, for peacekeeping or humanitarian work, KBR would be contracted by the American Department of Defense to supply the army forces with support services, equipment, infrastructure and so on. The immense profits would be divided among Halliburton, Nanabragov and Kanuk (whose plane was never shot down; he hid in Switzerland). So, in short, the whole Sevo-Svanï war is completely set up to make money. Interestingly, the extraordinary scheme is not one of Shteyngart’s satirical hyperboles. His illustration of how a multionational corporation skims millions of tax dollars by engaging in war is painfully accurate. In 2006, the same year that Shteyngart’s novel was published, director Robert Greenwald produced the documentary film Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers 283 . In the documentary, Greenwald reveals how Halliburton-KBR (and three other major private military contractors) have overbilled the Pentagon for providing unnecessary or ineffective services during the 2003 Iraq war (and the subsequent occupation of the country) by means of the LOGCAP (the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program), which allows private military companies to provide contingency support. The cooperation between the U.S. Army and Halliburton-KBR was agreed upon in a so-called ‘cost-plus contract’: the government reimburses all expenses that the private contractor thinks necessary to meet its contractual commitments and , as a fee, the private contractor is paid a certain percentage of its total expenditure. In the case of the Iraq contract, the fee for Halliburton-KBR was one percent. So, bluntly, the more a private contractor squanders tax money on unnecessary or overpriced goods or services, the more profit it makes. Greenwald explains how this type of contracting not only gives rise to a military-industrial complex that is eager for war, but also encourages mismanagement and profiting. In Absurdistan , Shteyngart applies the whole LOGCAP and ‘cost-plus’ controversy to a fictional setting, making the novel something of a roman à clef . However, the references to Halliburton-KBR, Dick Cheney (CEO of Halliburton until 2000, then Vice President during

282 ABS , 255 283 See http://www.iraqforsale.org

George W. Bush’s two terms) and even the Iraq war are explicit, which adds an unmistakingly direct political accusation to the novel:

“So I call my friend Dick Cheney – he was still CEO of Halliburton back then – and I say, ‘Hamoodi, this isn’t going to work. This country’s a complete zero. You can maybe do Iraq in a few years , depending on who wins the U.S. election, or blow up Panama one more time, but stay the hell out of the Caspian.’”284

In this respect, the temporal setting of the story is very symbolic: the whole “civil war” takes place in the summer of 2001, a couple of weeks before the 9/11 attacks that eventually led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As the truth about the ‘war’ in Absurdistan unfolds, the novel abruptly changes its course. The adventurous, identity-centered postmigration story featuring a homeless, Americanized Russian Jew suddenly makes room for a political pamphlet: the novel opens up, as it were, and aims at the scandalous sideffects of a politically and economically globalized world. What is more, the novel even exceeds the ‘mere’ practice of accusation in its political implications. In a truly grotesque fashion, Shteyngart takes the absurdity of the whole situation to a higher level. In Iraq, at least a real war took place – a war initiated on false grounds, but a war still. In Absurdistan , no party even bothers waging a real war. In a bitterly ironic way, the happenings in Absurdistan give proof of a pax mundi , a voluntary collaboration between several people of different ethnic and national background within the framework of economic and political globalization. Their shared interest, defrauding the American taxpayer and making money, brings them together. The American shtick of the post-Soviet East is extrapolated, up to the point that the old oppositions between what is known as the East and the West are no longer visible. Within the borders of Absurdsvanï, the same happens with regard to ethnic oppositions. They are minimalized from the start in Absurdistan and, eventually, they have not led to a real ethnic war at all, despite the fact that many people died in the fake war staged by the Sevo and the Svanï. In the globalized world, ethnic oppositions and conflicts continue to exist, it suggests, but now they are used as a tool to achieve ‘higher’ goals or to serve a hidden agenda. Whereas Vladimir Girshkin in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook said that “all love is socio-economic,” 285 Absurdistan cynically suggests that, nowadays, all war is socio-economic. The truth about the incredible corruption leaves Misha somehow outcasted. He has sacrificed his all-American, democratic beliefs only to end up being betrayed in a joint venture of America, the Sevo and the Svanï. His ambition do to something big, to impress his late father or

284 ABS , 309, my emphasis 285 RDH , 51

Rouenna, is shattered: “And then I understood. I’d been had. Utterly. Completely. They’d used me. Taken advantage of me. Sized me up. Known right away that they had their man. If ‘man’ is the right word.” 286 Misha is thrown back in his post-traumatic status of nearly emasculated manchild, not knowing what to do. Also on a narratological level, as a result of the shift in focus of the novel, Misha’s character is sidetracked: he is demoted to the position of passive onlooker who has no control over what happens above his head.

3.2 The ethnoreligious reflex

In the end, Misha flees Absurdistan, which is now completely in ruins, and takes refuge among the Mountain Jews, who save his life. The ending of the story is remarkable. For one, the prologue of the novel is actually a prolongation of that final scene set in “Davidovo, a small village populated entirely by the so-called Mountain Jews,” 287 which enhances the symbolic significance of the final scene. Moreover, the contrast with Misha’s fierce aversion to Jewish religion and community life begs for a closer look on the last chapter of Absurdistan (tellingly named “The Faith of My Fathers”). The Mountain Jews are peaceloving merchant people, intent on trading with Sevo as well as Svanï. They have a replica of the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem in Davidovo, a village that looks like an “antediluvian outpost of Hebraity.” 288 Misha, once the anti- Jewish multiculturalist who attacked an Hasid Jew on an airplane, is touched by the Mountain Jews’ hospitality and authenticity. Yitzhak, one of the town’s leaders, hits Misha in the heart with the following words:

“Several times it has happened to us – the young people leave for L.A. or Brooklyn, they marry an outsider, and after a few years they won’t come home for Pesach seder . They won’t even fly back to piss on their grandfathers’ graves. But when things go bad with their gentile wives or with their half-breed children, they run back to us. ‘Papa, papochka , what have I done? I’ve forsaken my people.’ And we welcome them back, and kiss them, and love them like they haven’t stabbed us through the heart. Because for us it’s simple. If you’re a Jew, even if you’re a sophisticate and a melancholic, you will always find a home here.” 289

286 ABS , 309 287 ABS , v 288 ABS , 328 289 ABS , 324

Misha becomes aware of “a growing debt,”290 especially when he learns that his late father is very much admired by the Mountain Jews. They even made a plaque in his honor. At the very end of the story, Misha succumbs to the sirens of the Mountain Jews:

A shard of crystal broke in me. I fell to the ground and threw myself around one of Avram’s prehistoric ankles. The Jews turned to look into my dumb blue eyes, and my dumb blue eyes looked back at them. “Thank you,” I was trying to say, although nothing came out. And then, with increasing levels of pleading and helplessness: “Oh thank you Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you!” 291

After everything that has happened to him, after all his illusions have been shattered, Misha finally seems to experience a feeling of really belonging. His ostensible reassertion of Jewishness, though, is problematic. As I have explained, the novel has ‘opened up’: its focus has shifted from the postmigration identity permutations of Misha’s character to a satirical, politically judgemental evaluation or illustration of the identity of the globalized world. There are two possible approaches, then, to this remarkable ending. In order to comment on the first one, I would first like to refer to my discussion of the final scene of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . In his article “Are Jews Multicultural Enough?” Sander L. Gilman basically echoed Rovner’s conclusion that the protagonist (Vladimir) is marked as essentially vulnerable and Other because of his Jewishness, and that, consequently, Shteyngart cannot rid himself of the essentialist identity politics that, in a way, thwart what I have called the postmigration identity permutations. Gilman added that Shteyngart’s novel is an antimulticultural novel, as it “stresses the impossibilty of integration.”292 One can interpret the last chapter of Absurdistan in a similar way. Despite his Americanized, liberal-multicultural attitude and despite the downright renunciation of Jewish religion and Jewish community life, Misha cannot prevent from being pulled, slowly but surely, towards the open arms of the Mountain Jews. In the end, he is unmistakably and essentially

290 ABS , 324 291 ABS , 329 – 330 292 Gilman, 205

Jewish, against his will (just like Vladimir Girshkin). Shteyngart’s performative identity politics are eventually superseded by mysterious forces of history or genetics that do not allow for a different outcome. In the case of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , I have showed how a postmigration-based approach offers ways to refute Rovner and Gilman’s claims, or at least to counterbalance them, by pointing at the function of meta-criticism in Shteyngart’s identity-informed discourse. In the same vein, the powerful and explicit political implications in Absurdistan can put the novel’s final scene in a different light. The temporal setting is an important clue in this respect: the story of Absurdistan is set, not arbitrarily, in the summer of 2001. Misha’s arrival in Davidovo, the village of the Mountain Jews, is on September 10, 2001, literally on the eve of the 9/11 attacks that put religious extremism on the map as one of the major threats to global safety in the 21 st century. If read in the light of the 9/11 attacks, Misha’s ‘homecoming’ in Davidovo and his reconciliation with orthodox Jewry becomes slightly disturbing, and evokes a lot of questions. When asked in an interview why he keeps bashing Jewish religious institutions, Shteyngart answered: “It’s not just Judaism. It’s religion in general. In my books, I wail on Judaism and Christianity. Islam takes care of itself – I don’t need to do anything with Islam.” 293 Bearing this quote in mind, and taking the extraordinary date of Misha’s ‘homecoming’ into account, one can easily see how that homecoming might be the foreboding of something less innocent. Misha’s ‘ethnoreligious reflex’ is the symbolic, metaphoric action that connects the whole adventure in Absurdistan to the 9/11 attacks – or better, to what the attacks have taught us in terms of identity in the 21 st century. Shteyngart demonstrates how globalisation inevitably offers new possibilities for corrupt regimes and greedy multinationals; how it replaces ideological oppositions or national mentalities with one universal and questionable globalist ethos; how it disorients people’s sense of national or ethnic identity and how it shatters their (illusion of) control over what happens in their environment. From this perspective, Misha is driven into the arms of the Mountain Jews not by his essential Otherness, but by the bewildering effect of these global permutations. His ‘homecoming’ symbolizes a religious revival that is a reaction against this new world and that serves as an alternative for those who feel threatened by the pervasive new mentalities (cf. the American shtick of the East). The upsurge of Islamic fundamentalism, of which the 9/11 attacks are a pinnacle, as well as the increasing popularity of neo-creationism and ‘intelligent design’ in the USA, are examples of the religious revival. In Absurdistan , Shteyngart hints at this revival by refering to ‘New Tribalism’. Misha announces that his Holocaust museum “will be infused with the spirit of the New Tribalism that is captivating young people across the Western world as an

293 Josh Lambert, “The True Name of Gary.” (Interview in Jbooks.com, The Online Jewish Book Community): http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Lambert_Shteyngart.htm

angry response to global homogenization.” 294 This indicates that Misha’s homecoming is not about the Jewish religion or culture per se , but about what it stands for: an almost prehistoric, ‘tribal’ feeling of belonging and a clear-cut, collective identity. The interpretation of the novel’s final scene as a mere ethnic shtick , like Rovner would call it, would mean an unfortunate denial of the novel’s explicit and implicit political implications.

294 ABS , 270

VI. THE END OF IDENTITY IN SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY

[ In this chapter, I will discuss Shteyngart’s latest novel Super Sad True Love Story . Mainly, I will focus on the status of identity in the novel in general. Also, Shteyngart’s political project, along with the absence of an immigration pattern in the story, will lead me to refine the postmigration concept. ]

As said before, Super Sad True Love Story stands apart from Shteyngart’s two other novels. The postmigration dimension, that has been a central concept in this thesis, is far less clear in the narratological orientation of this novel, which is set almost entirely in the USA. The protagonist, Lenny Abramov, is a Jew of Russian descent, just like Vladimir Girshkin, Misha Vainberg and Gary Shteyngart himself, but his identity as an immigrant is not really a quintessential theme in the story. Instead, Super Sad True Love Story focuses on (the future of) American society as a whole. Still, Shteyngart’s latest novel cannot be put aside from his two other novels completely, as we can distinguish a number of recurring themes and motifs. For instance, Shteyngart’s penchant for fictitious settings remains. Whereas the setting in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan was ‘alienated’ in a spatial sense, Super Sad True Love Story relies on the distortion of the temporal aspect. This invention of unrealistic places and times allows Shteyngart to do what he does best: writing cultural and political satire. Moreover, when it comes to political implications, Super Sad True Love Story seems to take up where Absurdistan left off. In Absurdistan , Shteyngart brings to light what has already happened to American society and politics. In Super Sad True Love Story , Shteyngart takes the matter a step further and gives a satirical sketch of what might become of America “in a very near future (oh, let’s say next Tuesday)” 295 by extrapolating the sociocultural, political and economic problems and vices of today. In a way, Super Sad True Love Story is the next logical step in Shteyngart’s political project.

295 SSTLS , on back cover

Super Sad True Love Story is a satirical and a dystopian novel, but it does not compare to the archetypes of the genre such as Aldous Huxley’s science fiction novel Brave New World . Shteyngart has chosen to implement a critical degree of recognizability in his novel, which makes his prophetic voice even more haunting. In several interviews, Shteyngart has talked about how reality was catching up on him when he was writing the dystopian novel, and how he had to make America’s situation worse and worse once the financial and economic crisis of 2008 set in:

“When I started writing 'Super Sad,' the research took me to the idea that the real estate market, because of all the sub-prime mortgages, was going to burst, and that it would take along with it all the hedge funds and investment banks, provoking an economic meltdown. [...] Well that happened in 2008.”296

What Shteyngart has finally come up with in the summer of 2010 is a novel that is unsettling because of its directness, but at the same time entertaining because of its satirical hyperboles. 297

1. THE EXISTENTIAL, POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CRISIS

Basically, in Super Sad True Love Story , Shteyngart aims at an America that is not only politically or economically wasted, but that is also facing its self-destruction on an existential level. In a world dominated by consumerism and technological advancement, everything and everybody has to be ‘fresh’ or ‘new’ or ‘young’. The notion ‘old’ has been stripped of its charms completely; old has become horror. The notion of mortality, which used to connect all human beings regardless of race or place or time, has become taboo. The protagonist of Super Sad True Love Story , Lenny Abramov, works at the Post-Human Services of a major firm. His job is to track down potential clients for an Indefinite Life Extension program. Living forever and staying young forever is also a personal obsession for Lenny (although he could never afford it). The first sentence of his first diary entry shows his determination to overcome existence by overcoming death: “Dearest Diary, Today I’ve made a major decision: I am never going to die .” 298

296 Joe Satran, “Gary Shteyngart, Writer Of ‘Super Sad True Love Story,’ Talks Debt Default And American Decline.” (Interview in The Huffington Post, 19-7-2011): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/19/garyshteyngart-super-sad-true-love-story_n_901764.html 297 As a matter of fact, when I was adding the finishing touch to this thesis, in August 2011, the news headlines were dominated by two major events: the American (and global) debt crisis and the riots in London. In Super Sad True Love Story , Shteyngart ‘predicts’ these events with uncanny accuracy. 298 SSTLS , 3

In Super Sad True Love Story , the gap between the rich and the poor has become bigger than ever. Everybody is given a certain “credit ranking,” which reduces their entire personality to a number and fixes their place in the social pecking order. The streets are filled with so-called “credit poles”, which displays the credit ranking of passers-by for everyone to see. The terms HNWI and LNWI (High resp. Low Net Worth Individuals) are used as if to denote a subspecies. Lenny’s job is to look for HNWI’s and not for LNWIs, since the latter are ITP (Impossible To Preserve). Whereas The Russian Debutante’s Handbook ironically shows that “all love is socio- economic” 299 and Absurdistan that all war is socio-economic, as I have explained, Super Sad True Love Story expands the idea and shows a society in which sheer existence has completely become ‘socio-economic’. Moreover, in the spirit of scientific progressivism, the most basic human feelings have become artificial. In his novel, Shteyngart commodifies existentially loaded concepts such as happiness, love or mood:

One day, if our race is to survive, we will have to figure out how to download her goodness and install it in our children. In the meantime, my mood indicators on The Boards went from “meek but cooperative” to “playful/cuddly/likes to learn new things.” 300

In a truly dystopian fashion, the soullessness of it all accounts for a society that has lost touch with the fine art of being yourself, of being human.

The existential inferno in Super Sad True Love Story is staged against the background of a politically and economically defeated USA. American democracy has devoured itself and the country is now ruled by the dictatorial ARA (American Restoration Authority) in service of the Bipartisan party. Because of LNWI riots, New York City is a city under siege. The corporation Staatling- Wapachung, Lenny’s employer, is in charge of public security by means of martial law. In a way, Staatling-Wapachung is a remake of Halliburton, that other politically powerful corporation. The position of the USA in the global economy is even worse. The USA is heavily indebted to China, the new economic world power, and American currency is already ‘Yuan-pegged’. America has become “an unstable, barely governable country presenting grave risk to the international system of corporate governance and exchange mechanisms,” 301 as the Central Bank of China puts it. The

299 RDH , 51 300 SSTLS , 180 301 SSTLS , 179

United Nations Headquarters has been converted to a mall – a temple of consumerism – called the UNRC (The United Retail Corridors). Shteyngart’s novel is packed with clues of the political and cultural degeneration of the USA, but the new destination of the building that used to harbor the most important political institution worldwide is probably the most startling:

The afterglow of the setting sun rushed through the glass roof of the UNRC, the steel trellises hundreds of feet above us gleaming like the ribs of a fearsome animal. I think this is where the Security Council used to meet, although I could be wrong. 302

On a sociocultural level, America’s situation is equally unsettling. Small but poignant clues include the total lack of care for correct spelling, even in public announcements (“Together We’ll Repare [sic] This Bridge.” 303 ) and the ridiculously elaborate use of abbreviations such as TIMATOV (Think I’m About To Openly Vomit) and JBF (Just Butt-Fucking). The so-called äppärät , a remarkably Iphone-like personal tablet computer, is the indispensable link between one’s self and the rest of the world. Even during live person-to-person encounters, the äppärät remains an important communication tool. It contains almost all information about its owner and allows for an exchange with other people. Privacy has become an empty word, or worse, it is associated with old, detestable lifestyle. Despite the lack of privacy, or perhaps because of it, social life in Super Sad True Love Story fits in with Shteyngart’s predicition that “we are approaching a world of incredible atomization” and that “this century will prove to be the century of the lonely person.” 304

In the end of the story, after a small civil war, the USA is taken over entirely by the Chinese and by the IMF in a revolution called ‘the Rupture’. New York City turns into a sort of tourist paradise for rich Asian and European people. The era of American world hegemony has passed.

302 SSTLS , 208 303 SSTLS , 100 304 Shteyngart in Berlinerblau, 22

2. THE STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY

2.1 Jewish identity

If we take a step aside from the political implications in Super Sad True Love Story , we can have a closer look on how the assertion of identitiy compares to Shteyngart’s identity politics in his two other novels. Although the protagonist of the story is a Russian Jewish immigrant again, ethnic identity and the immigrant experience are not as much foregrounded in Shteyngart’s third novel as the political cataclysm. The dystopian dimension of the novel accounts for this shift in focus in Shteyngart’s writing. Especially the relative absence of Jewish identity is remarkable in Super Sad True Love Story . Whereas The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan still draw attention to the Jewish heritage of the protagonists (for instance, by implicating the Holocaust or anti-Semitism), Jewish identity is kept at bay in Super Sad True Love Story (apart from a number of references to the stereotypical “inbred Jewish willingness to laugh strategically at [him]self.”305 ) When his self- imaging as a Jew does pop up, it is completely defined in terms of the existential crisis and the taboo of mortality described above. Shteyngart presents Jewish self-consciousness as an obsession for dark thoughts and for death; a burdensome, reactionary sthick , as it were, in a time that glorifies immortality and shallowness. Throughout the story, Lenny tries to come to grips with his life as an old melancholic, his mind “full of sickening Jewish worry, the pogrom within and the pogrom without.”306 He has trouble putting down his nostalgia for Jewish intelligentsia, who “came from poor, hardy families and [...] were realistic about dying.”307 In a strange scene set in the New York zoo, Lenny feels a sudden emotional connection with an elephant. What prompted this unusual identification is a remark by Eunice, Lenny’s Korean American girlfriend. She playfully laughs at his big ‘Jewish’ nose, “the endless thing,” 308 and compares it to the elephant’s proboscis:

And then it occured to me, lucky me mirrored in the beast’s eye, lucky Lenny having his trunk kissed by Eunice Park: The elephant knows . The elephant knows there is nothing after this life and very little in it. The elephant is aware of his eventual extinction and he is hurt by it, reduced by it, made to feel his solitary

305 SSTLS , 88 306 SSTLS , 164 307 SSTLS , 216 308 SSTLS , 119

nature, he who will eventually trample his way through bush and scrub to lie down and die where his mother once trembled at her haunches to give him life. Mother, aloneness, entrapment, extinction. The elephant is essentially an Ashkenazi animal, but a wholly rational one – it too wants to live forever. 309

On the one hand, Lenny has expressed the wish to live forever, but on the other hand he cannot help being attracted by this tragic, melancholic, ‘Ashkenazi’ sense of loss. The evocation of the elephant’s birth and death, the reconstruction of the chain of life that affects animals as well as human beings, and the awareness of an existential void indicate Lenny’s inability to part with history and its continuity of life and death – although he would want to. All in all, Jewish identity in Super Sad True Love Story is very much restricted to this faint sense of loss and emptiness. In order to get a clear view on this minimalistic assertion of Jewishness, it proves interesting to check Rovner’s article on the New Immigrant Chic again. It will be recalled that Rovner blames Shteyngart for desperately trying to “claim a vicarious Jewish distinctiveness that only underscores the successful acculturation of earlier generations of Jews into the American maintstream.” 310 According to Rovner, Shteyngart falls back on trite and futile stereotypes to give his first novel a Jewish ethnic shtick . When applied to Super Sad True Love Story , Rovner’s general evaluation of Shteyngart’s assertion of Jewish identity is probably the most persuasive as it gets. For Lenny, being conscious of his Jewish heritage is a way of fulfilling his latent desire to stand apart from the current zeitgeist , to acknowledge the basic, existential touchstones of life, and to indulge in his solitary melancholia. So in a way, Lenny’s Jewish self- reflection exemplifies what Rovner calls a “nostalgia for difference.” 311 Because of the minimalist ‘Jewish repertoire’ in Shteyngart’s novel, Lenny’s enigmatic identification with Jewishness (or, for instance, with the ‘Ashkenazi’ elephant) indeed resembles an ethnic shtick , as if Lenny is ethnically determined to be a melancholic. His assertion of Jewishness does not reach further than that. Yet, rather than dismissing the restricted role of Jewish ethnicity in the novel as a failed attempt to regain a slightly Jewish distinction in literature, it should be considered part of a larger project in Shteyngart’s identity-based discourse. The existential crisis in the story that I have outlined earlier on is crucial in this respect, as it proves that Shteyngart’s novel is not about the representation of (Jewish) identity per se , but about a deconstruction of all identity. The American society depicted in Super Sad True Love Story redefines identity entirely in terms of socio-economic status. All other potential factors that used to make up one’s holistic identity – nationality,

309 SSTLS , 120 310 Rovner, 317 311 Rovner, 322

political orientation, ethnicity, religion, the immigrant experience, ... – are wiped out or have become (almost) irrelevant. America is reduced to a shadow of its former self, up to the point that American national identity has become an empty notion. And, naturally, socio-economic oppositions have filled the vacuüm. When Lenny (who is relatively well-off) visits a Great Depression-like manifestation by LNWIs, he is practically linched: “Now I was completely confused. And a little scared. Who were these people all around me? Americans, I guess. But what did that even mean anymore?”312 His American passport, the symbol of national identity that used to vouch for democratic civil rights, has lost its value, just like the national currency: “I took out my U.S. passport and held it in my hand, fingering its embossed golden eagle, still hoping that it meant something.” 313 Even the Bipartisan Party, installed to restore unity among the American people, fails to turn the tide. What is more, politics and idealism have become taboo. David, an ex-soldier and friend of Eunice, makes the following prediction: “I think when the dust settles and the Bipartisans are history that’s how we’re going to live, as small units who don’t agree. I don’t know what we’ll call it, political parties, military councils, city-states, but that’s how it’s going to be.”314 Social coherence has disappeared and collective identity is totally distorted. Nobody seems to know exactly how they can transcend their individuality. In a world that celebrates the idea of immortality on earth, religion, too, has lost its essential raison d’être . The fact that the offices of Post Human Services, where Lenny works, are in a former synagogue is a symbolic and ironic indication of religion’s superfluity. When Lenny, who rejects all religion, joins his Korean American girlfriend and her family to a Christian service of worship for Korean immigrants, he gets increasingly unsettled by the sermon of Reverend Suk, who is the hyperbolic archetype of the guilt-inducing, repressive Church apparatchik , as it were: “‘Forget all the good you have done!’ Reverend Suk was shouting. ‘If you pride the good, if you don’t throw away the good, you will never stand in front of God. Do not accept the good before God. Do not accept your thoughts!’”315 In a reverie, Lenny imagines an epic, scathing sermon on how “Christianity was as unsatisfying and delusional an idea as it had ever been.”316

“We Jews, we thougth all this stuff up, we invented this Big Lie from which all Christianity, all Western civilization, has sprung, because we too were ashamed. So much shame. The shame of being overpowered by stronger nations. The endless martyrdom. [...] Get up off your knees. Do not throw away your heart. Keep your

312 SSTLS , 107 313 SSTLS , 42 314 SSTLS , 177 315 SSTLS , 190 316 SSTLS , 187

heart. Your heart is all that matters. Throw away your shame! Throw away your modesty! Throw away your ancestors! Throw away your fathers and the self- appointed fathers that claim to be stewards of God. Throw away your shyness and the anger that lies just a few inches beneath. Do not believe the Judeo-Christian lie! Accept your thoughts! Accept your desires! Accept the truth! And if there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work – learn to choose. You are good enough, you are human enough , to choose!” 317

Lenny renounces what he considers the foundation of religion: victimhood. However, in the end, Lenny’s outcry becomes bitterly ironic. He claims that people are human enough to make their own decisions and to find their own way in life, whereas the American society in Super Sad True Love Story is increasingly de -humanized: all existential touchstones of life (such as the inevitability of death) are deconstructed. Lenny believes that he liberates the individual by doing away with supposed restrictions on freedom or emancipation, but in fact, human existence (which always comes with doubt, shame, regret or other feelings of the mortals) is stripped entirely in Super Sad True Love Story , since those ‘mortal’ feelings have become taboo. It does not need to surprise, then, that ethnic identity, too, has been watered down.

2.2 Traumatic identity

Although Shteyngart has made the ‘end of identity’ something of a Sword of Damocles in Super Sad True Love Story , Lenny’s character is put forward as a silent and subtle protest against the loss of self-awareness. His profile as a rather old and old-fashioned melancholic somehow stands apart from the shallow society in which he lives. In the end, literature will redeem Lenny (cf. infra), but there is another factor in the story that accounts for a firm assertion of identity: personal trauma. The reliving or reconsideration of things past and the focus on failure or unhappiness is a cultural deadly sin in the novel’s brave new world, but for Lenny, it is an important element of his life as human being. Interestingly, trauma has been an important denominator of identity in Shteyngart’s other novels as well. In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , Vladimir’s trauma had to do with anti-Semitism in Russia, as well as with an unbearable parental pressure. In Absurdistan , Misha’s trauma is related to the sloppy circumcision that affected his sense of manhood and that

317 SSTLS , 190

threw him in a kind of freudian, regressive emotional dependency. In those two novels, the protagonists’ traumas have direct repercussions on how they experience, for instance, their Jewish identity or their identity as an immigrant. In Super Sad True Love Story , however, trauma becomes an assertion of identity in its own right. The significance of identity in the world that Shteyngart has created in Super Sad True Love Story is a subtle yet remarkable example of a zeitgeist that resists the influence of history on the present and that is obsessed with constant change and renewal. Instead of understanding the notion of ‘identity’ as a sort of organic, unfinalized synthesis of one’s experiences in life so far, the average American in Shteyngart’s novel conceives of identity as an instantaneous snapshot, or a blueprint for tomorrow:

Joshie [Lenny’s boss] has always told Post-Human Services staff to keep a diary, to remember who we were , because every moment our brains and synapses are being rebuilt and rewired with maddening disregard for our personalities, so that each year, each month, each day we transform into a different person, an utterly unfaithful iteration of our original selves, of the drooling kid in the sandbox. But not me. I am still a facsimile of my early childhood. I am still looking for a loving dad to lift me up and brush the sand off my ass and to hear English, calm and hurtless, fall off his lips. 318

This fragment suggests that the dynamism of American life – once its major strength and an attraction for many immigrants and investors – has got out of hand and has turned into a self- destructive estrangement from a supposed ‘essence’. For Lenny, his traumatic feelings are what reminds him of himself. They seem to constitute what is left of his ‘identity’. The exact nature of Lenny’s trauma, then, is of lesser importance in this respect. Shteyngart’s evocation of Lenny’s traumatic (or semi-traumatic) feelings remains rather suggestive. Like in Shteyngart’s other two novels, though, the trauma is rooted in childhood and can be situated in family life. Lenny’s relationship with his parents is problematic. On the one hand, he blames them for not giving him a satisfying childhood (cf. the fragment above), but on the other hand he is dependent on them, as if he realizes that his self-proclaimed trauma is perhaps a grip for him, more than it is a burden. In one of his to-do lists, Lenny mentions: “Be Nice to Parents (Within Limits) – They may be mean to you but they represent your past and

318 SSTLS , 65

who you are.” 319 When he meets his parents along with Eunice, he cannot help but seeing a continuity between his mother and his girlfriend, as if he went from the one mother to the other: “This child , they seemed to be saying... This child still needs to be brought up. ”320 Several similar clues signal the impact of Lenny’s past on his current emotional situation. In the first place, these clues counterbalance the idea that Lenny has completely submerged in the existentially barren society that Shteyngart has set out in his novel.

3. POSTMIGRATION AS A POLITICAL PASTICHE

In the previous paragraph, I have explained how traditional identity is deconstructed in Super Sad True Love Story : political orientation, ethnic identity, religion and the immigrant experience are watered down and have lost their hold on the identity politics in the novel. Still, the postmigration concept, which can be considered the centerpiece of this thesis, is also of interest to us with regard to Super Sad True Love Story , although its meaning or, better, its scope should be slightly adjusted. It will be recalled that, in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook – probably Shteyngart’s most factually autobiographical novel – the postmigration dimension is situated on a very personal level. Via a postmigration detour, as it were, Vladimir Girshkin’s immigrant experience is put in a central position in the novel. The confrontation of ethnic and national identities in the ad hoc setting of Prava in the first place affects Vladimir’s personal identity. On a more political level, the nature of national identity and matters of assimilation and multiculturalism were also commented upon, especially in the end of the story, in a meta-critical discourse. In Absurdistan , the postmigration dimension gradually shifts its focus from the renegotiation of Misha’s personal identity to the explicit political implications in the novel. Near the end of the story, it becomes clear that the events in the postmigration setting of Absurdsvanï indicate a direct political accusation. Moreover, they can be interpreted as part of a cultural debate concerning identity in the globalized world. In the end, these political implications have somehow overshadowed Misha’s personal experiences. In Super Sad True Love Story , then, the postmigration dimension can be almost entirely defined in terms of politics and cultural criticism. Whereas postmigration in Absurdistan was still balanced between the protagonist’s personal immigrant experience and global political implications, Super Sad True Love Story actually minimalizes the former. The identity of the USA as a nation, rather than Lenny’s identity as a

319 SSTLS , 51 320 SSTLS , 142

Russian Jewish immigrant, is what the postmigration permutations in the novel are about. In an interview with World Literature Today , Shteyngart himself states that, apart from the character in the story, he is “also very interested in a world of ideas . [...] I’m very interested in day-to-day life in different countries and cultures and different politics, and how politics affect the personal.” 321 Of course, the usage of the term ‘postmigration’ can be a bit misleading in this respect, given that the protagonist’s identity as an immigrant is less important. However, if we fall back on what the term basically stands for – an ad hoc confrontation of varying identities and mentalities in literature, irrespective of traditional spatiotemporal parameters – we can still apply it properly. Despite the fact that matters of migration obviously are not at stake in Super Sad True Love Story like they were in Shteyngart’s two other works, the political implications in the novel do fit in with Shteyngart’s programmatic intention to encompass all aspects of the Russian immigrant’s life in America. In other words, not all topics concerning immigration that Shteyngart tends to push through in his fiction have to be represented via the immigrant experience of the protagonist. Rather than restricting the discussion of postmigration in Shteyngart’s work to the literary representation of the immigrant experience per se , we should also take into account Shteyngart’s own identity as an immigrant (writer) and how that identity influences the way that he looks at a range of topics. These topics do not necessarily have to be related to issues of immigration or Jewish Russian identity. This approach brings us back to the concern that prompted this thesis in the first place: the sociocultural phenomenon of Shteyngart’s fiction. The significance of the postmigration concept, then, can be transposed: we can understand the postmigration dimension not only as the reduction of the immigrant experience to its ontological core in literature, but also, more widely, as the poetical foundation of Shteyngart’s work, whether it stages immigrant characters or not.

A detailed illustration of this poetical postmigration dimension of Super Sad True Love Story can help make things clear. The evocation of America’s downfall in the novel is more than just an extrapolation of the vices that are said to haunt the USA today. Shteyngart invigorates (so to speak) his dystopian sketch of American life with a number of references to the former Soviet Union. In a way, American politics in the novel actually resemble the worn-out regime of the Soviet Union right before its collapse. The USA has become a single-party state, run by a dictatorial Bipartisan party that heavily relies upon the military for order and state repression. When Lenny arrives at JFK airport in the beginning of the story, he has to go through an intimidating border control, which reminds of the traumatic Leningrad airport scene in The

321 Brown and Celayo, 29, my emphasis

Russian Debutante’s Handbook (cf. supra). The difference between the former Soviet Union and America becomes very uncertain for Lenny: “I remember how my parents would talk about the luck of their having left the Soviet Union for America. Oh God, I thought, let there still be such luck in this new world.” 322 It turns out that there is practically no such luck. The ARA is the executive authority that restricts personal freedom (in the name of national security, supposedly) and intends to cover up its repressive measures in an absurdly bureaucratic, pre-glasnost fashion. The following warning appears on every sign or National Guard checkpoint in the city that gives proof of the regime’s repression: “BY READING THIS SIGN YOU HAVE DENIED EXISTENCE [...] AND IMPLIED CONSENT.” 323 When things get worse in the course of the story, the climate of distrust thickens. One of Lenny’s closest friends is suspected of being a spy for the Bipartisan regime. Vishnu, another friend of Lenny, warns him: “Who knows what they got him for. His Credit ranking’s been going to shit [...]. Half of Staten Island is collaborating. Everyone’s looking for backing, for protection.” 324 In the end, it turns out that Vishnu himself was working for the KGB-like intelligence agency of the regime. When Lenny says to himself that “your parents grew up in a dictatorship and one day you might be living in one too,” 325 the Shteyngartian irony only affirms the utter unlikeliness of the former Cold World oppositions to stand ground. Shteyngart’s continuous hinting at the Soviet Union takes other, less political forms as well. For some reason, the pocket computer that is the centerpiece of social and cultural life in Super Sad True Love Story is called an äppärät . That is quite unusual, considering that most electronic devices today have an English name, even in many other languages. If we think of the äppärät as the symbolic embodiment of all the typically American tendencies that have derailed social and cultural life (individualism, materialism and consumerism, shallow digital communication instead of meeting people in real life) the Russian naming is very ironic. It brings the Soviet Union yet another step closer to home. Moreover, the word äppärät bears resemblance to the well-known Russian derogatory term apparatchik , meaning professional functionary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union government apparatus, or, by extension, any loyal, bureaucratic follower of a strict regime. The negative connotation of the word taints, from a psycholinguistic point of view, the strange word äppärät . Bearing the numerous hints at the political and cultural climate in the former Soviet Union in mind, one can see what Shteyngart aims at in his dystopian novel. In a way, Shteyngart makes amends with history. At the end of the Cold War, the balance of power between Russia

322 SSTLS , 42 323 SSTLS , 43 324 SSTLS , 95 325 SSTLS , 51

and the USA was widely agreed upon, as Misha Vainberg points out in Absurdistan : “Let us be certain: the Cold War was won by one side and lost by another.” 326 Super Sad True Love Story , however, as a sort of epilogue to the Cold War, suggests that the Soviet Union indeed was the first loser of the Cold War, but that the USA, after all, is the second loser. The implosion of the USA mirrors that of the Soviet Union in 1991. In that sense, a reversal of roles is at hand here. Whereas Russia was flooded with American influences after the collapse of the Soviet Union (the so-called American shtick that I have talked about in my discussion of Absurdistan ), the USA is now invaded by Russian influence – hence the äppärät – and, more widely, is dominated by other (formerly) Communist nations. For example, in the end of the story, America is taken over economically by the Chinese and Lenny finds himself at a “shindig to welcome the visiting members of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Capitalist Party” 327 When Lenny visits the Korean service of worship with the family of his girlfriend, he notices that the Reverend “seemed like the perfect preacher for citizens of an insecure, rapidly developing nation, a nation that Korea had recently been.” 328 Now, however, Korea is a prosperous nation, unlike the USA. This even affects the migration patterns: “I got the sense that these [congregants] weren’t the A-level Koreans, most of whom had returned to the motherland after the economic scales had tipped toward Seoul.” 329 America, traditionally the New World, the immigrant’s safe haven, has become an Old World from where people (even former immigrants) flee to a better place. Eventually, even Lenny himself emigrates. In the last “chapter” of the novel, Lenny tells us what happened to him after the super sad love story in New York City ended. He emigrated to Canada, got a Canadian passport and changed his name from Lenny Abramov to Larry Abraham. After that, he moved to Tuscany, “a place with less data, less youth, and where old people like myself were not despised simply for being old, where an older man, for example, could be considered beautiful.” 330

As I have showed, the political implications of Super Sad True Love Story transcend the “all- American.” The dystopian depiction of American society in the novel is mediated through a bunch of references to Soviet-Russian national identity. Also, it can be argued that, reversely, the fall of the Soviet empire is vaguely reconstructed in an American context so as to disclose the universality of a nation in decline. Anyhow, the osmotic mutuality between the American setting and the Soviet-Russian references accounts for what I have defined as the poetical postmigration

326 ABS , 57 327 SSTLS , 316, my emphasis 328 SSTLS , 188 329 SSTLS , 183 330 SSTLS , 328

dimension in Shteyngart’s work. It indicates Shteyngart’s immigrant identity as a writer, the immigrant’s inability to think of his old homeland without filtering it through the prism of his new homeland, and vice versa. Basically, this “neither here, nor there” 331 attitude is what postmigration is all about. Although the protagonist in Super Sad True Love Story does not go through a geographical ad hoc immigrant experience like the protagonists of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan, the three novels are connected programmatically by Shteyngart’s immigrant outlook. The dystopian setting of New York serves the same purposes as Prava and Absurdsvanï: all three places are a political, cultural or existential pastiche of Russian and/or American society. The only difference is that in his first two novels, Shteyngart focuses on the spatial aspect of the setting, whereas in his latest novel, he chooses to work the temporal aspect. Moreover, the poetical postmigration dimension in Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story is enhanced by the fact that Shteyngart is not ‘merely’ an immigrant: he is an immigrant from a country that no longer exists. This situation even intensifies the fascination for the old homeland. For Shteyngart, the collapse of the Soviet Union is a myth that can be drawn upon in fiction to inform or to layer the main story. Super Sad True Love Story indicates that Shteyngart, because of his identity as a Russian immigrant, understands the enormous dramatic and mythical value of a nation, especially one of the world’s superpowers, in decay. In the interview with World Literature Today , Shteyngart is asked the following question: “Do you feel that as an immigrant writer you can add to or give a more unique aspect of the American experience?” 332 Shteyngart replies that Russia and America – no matter what guise they are under – “will always have these messianic visions,” 333 which connects them. Consequently, the chronicles of their collapse will inevitably converge in what I have referred to as the poetical postmigration dimension of Shteyngart’s work.

4. IDENTITY IN LITERATURE

In this last paragraph, the existential struggle for identity in Super Sad True Love Story will be foregrounded again. Apart from Lenny’s traumatic feelings, there is another important motif that signals the perseverance of identity in the novel: literature itself. In Shteyngart’s dystopian society, books are the vile embodiment of the old way of life: they are a smelly fetish object for miserable,

331 RDH , 97 332 Brown and Celayo, 31 333 Brown and Celayo, 31

melancholic freaks. Most people do not even know what a “book” is anymore. The object goes by another name now:

“I’ve got books in there.” “Who?” “Printed, bound media artifacts . Some of them are very imporant.” “I think I just refluxed my lunch.” 334

Except for a few sophisticates, nobody reads. One of these ‘sophisticates’ – the only one in the story, actually – is Lenny. He still loves to read and has an impressive personal library, which he calls the Wall of Books. Lenny’s books mean the world to him:

I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure non had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” 335

Exactly because of his love for books and literature, Lenny distinguishes himself from the mass. Even more than his faint Jewishness and his traumatic feelings, Lenny’s passion for literature serves to assert a personal identity; reading books is a symbolic way for Lenny to resist the cultural climate of the time in which he is living: “I mean, what if Eunice and I just said ‘no’ to all this. To this bar. To this FACing. [Form A Community; via a bluetooth feature of the äppärät, people who are in the same room can rate each other – TJ] The two of us. What if we just went home and read books to each other.” 336 Lenny’s friends warn him that books drag down his personality rankings, but Lenny does not give up. To please Eunice, who, initially, hates his smelly Wall of Books, Lenny is prepared to make a concession:

I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell . And yet, in preparation for the eventual arrival of Eunice Park, I decided to be safe and sprayed some Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast in the vicinity of my tomes, fanning the atomized juices with my hands in the direction of their spines.337

334 SSTLS , 310, my emphasis 335 SSTLS , 52 336 SSTLS , 94 337 SSTLS , 52

Especially in Shteyngart’s work, the disdain for books and literature (wonderfully expressed by the Shteyngartian hyperbole in this quote) is a powerful signal. In Shteyngart’s two other novels, literature is an important motif. The novels are packed with intertextual references to famous writers. Moreover, Shteyngart draws upon literature to give the identity of his characters or the description of a situation more ‘body’. In a way, the literary references are part of the postmigration dimension and its confrontation of identities and mentalities. They serve as a cultural translator, as a universal carrier of meanings that overrules the cultural and political oppositions that originated during the Cold War. In the interview with World Literature Today , Shteyngart argues that, although the Soviet Union has definitely lost the Cold War, the Russian people can still be proud of Russian literature: “Russian literature was very big during the Cold War – Pasternak, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn. People were lining up to buy a thousand-page Solzhenitsyn volume.” 338 For Shteyngart, the references to Russian literature are a form of a revenge. A thorough discussion of intertextuality in The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan would constitute an entire thesis in its own right, so I will not elaborate on the matter. Rather than sorting out the numerous separate intertextual references in Shteyngart’s work, it proves more interesting to have a closer look on the significance of the phenomenon ‘literature’ in general. Super Sad True Love Story is particularly suitable in this respect, as the novel explicitly deals with literature as a stronghold of identity. In the beginning of the story, Lenny stands alone with his love for literature. Yet, as things get worse in New York City near the end, Eunice changes her attitude. The two things that she used to despise the most – old people and books – have given her life a new direction: “Because we can’t connect to our äppäräti, we’re learning to turn to each other. Once, after a long weekend of scrubbing and watering our elderly, she even asked me to read to her.” 339 Lenny picks out one particular novel: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by the Czech writer Milan Kundera. As the title already suggests, Kundera’s novel is a novel of ideas that deals with a number of philosophical questions. The story, basically a love story, is set against the background of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a time of political turmoil. The resemblance to the situation in Super Sad True Love Story itself is remarkable. In this scene, Shteyngart suggests that his novel is a loose, postmodern pastiche of The Unbearable Lightness of Being . The osmotic mutuality that I have discussed with regard to the poetical postmigration dimension of the novel has repercussions on the level of intertextual references as well. Although The Unbearable Lightness of Being evokes a lot of feelings with Eunice and Lenny, Eunice is unable to understand the impact of the novel on her, as she “never really learned how

338 Brown and Celayo, 31 339 SSTLS , 274

to read texts [...] Just to scan them for info.”340 Lenny feels angry and frustrated and throws the copy across the room. His wish to connect fully with Eunice, his hope for redemption through literature, is put on hold. Even so, he tries to comfort his girlfriend:

Even I’m having trouble following this. It’s not just you. Reading is difficult. People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. [...] We don’t have to read anymore. We don’t have to ever read again. I promise. [...] It’s a luxury. A stupid luxury. 341

Despite this failed attempt to reassert themselves and their relationship, to challenge the vices of their time, something has changed for Lenny and Eunice. Eunice is impressed with the power of literature, although she cannot grasp the precise impact and although the chances at redemption have become small. In one of the last scenes of the novel, Shteyngart symbolically illustrates Eunice’s catharsis, as it were. Lenny and Eunice are evicted from their apartment and are relocated as a result of the Rupture. When Lenny enters the apartment, Eunice is already packing. They can only take with them a part of their stuff and, surprisingly, Eunice is only interested in Lenny’s Wall of Books. The ritual of saving the books brings them closer together.

I dumped the books into the cardboard boxes, Eunice quickly moving over to repack them, because I was not placing them in an optimal way, because I was useless at manipulating objects and making the most out of the least. We worked in silence for the better part of three hours, Eunice directing me and scolding me when I made a mistake, as the Wall of Books began to empty and the boxes began to groan with thirty years’ of reading material, the entirety of my life as a thinking person. 342

What is more, Eunice now has to convince Lenny of the urgency of treasuring the Wall of Books, and no longer the other way around. Lenny is disappointed over “the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world.”343 Indeed, the books have not changed the world, or American society, but they have changed the life of Lenny and Eunice – so it seems. Yet, Super Sad True Love Story does not fail to live up to the promise of the title: in the very end, Eunice leaves Lenny for Joshie, his boss. Eunice’s ‘crush’ on Lenny’s Wall of Books

340 SSTLS , 277 341 SSTLS , 277 342 SSTLS , 311 343 SSTLS , 311

was a desperate attempt to turn the tide, to free herself; but in the end, Eunice succumbs to Joshie, a staunch defender of the Life Extension Program and everything else that the brave new world of America stands for.

The last chapter of Super Sad True Love Story offers an interesting perspective on the role of literature in the novel. The chapter actually consists of a number of authorial notes by Lenny on the Chinese edition of his diary entries and Eunice’s text messages (that make up the actual novel). Lenny has become a writer, although some critics have accused him of “slavish emulation of the final generation of American ‘literary’ writers.” 344 Other critics, however, think of his work as “a tribute to literature as it once was .” 345 This is ironic, considering that the epistolary novel is actually the prototypical starting point of the genre. After Lenny fled the USA, his rebirth as a ‘writer’ initiated his new life. In a sense, literature has redeemed Lenny. It has saved him from oblivion. It has given meaning to all that he has been through. Once he cared for his Wall of Books, and now his books take care of him. The self-conscious dimension of the last chapter signals the programmatic importance of literature in Super Sad True Love Story . Basically, the depiction of the new America in Shteyngart’s novel is an extrapolation of the concerns that we have identified in the Howe-doctrine in the very beginning of this thesis. Howe feared the evaporation of Jewish American fiction as a result of the evaporation of distinctive Jewish identity in the American mainstream. As I have explained, in Super Sad True Love Story , Shteyngart has sketched a society that is indeed robbed of distinctive ethnic identity, and, even more, of practically every form of identity – literature included. Still, literature proves the major source of redemption. Not only does literature save Lenny’s identity, it is also seized upon by Shteyngart himself to illustrate the flexibility and performativity of literature in general. So Shteyngart’s novel has corrected Howe’s assumptions regarding identity and literature. Whereas Howe saw identity as the foundation of fiction (and, consequently, Jewish American identity as the foundation or conditio sine quae non of Jewish American fiction) Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story suggests that the roles can be reversed: literature can be the foundation of identity. In the final comments of this thesis, I will elaborate on this conclusion.

344 SSTLS , 327, my emphasis 345 SSTLS , 327

FINAL COMMENTS

Hide-and-seek

In the following fragment of an interview on his latest novel, Shteyngart reveals what will be the next step in his literary project.

Shteyngart said that he’s depressed by how many of the parodic, extreme predictions he’s made have come true. So with his next book, which he’s in the midst of writing, he’s getting out of the futurist game. Instead, he’s looking back, in a memoir, to his experience growing up in the Soviet Union.

“I’m going to write about my childhood,” he said. “It’s about time.”346

Indeed, one can think that it is about time. As I have showed in this thesis, Shteyngart’s childhood in the Soviet Union, as well as his childhood immigrant experience in the USA is a blind spot in his fiction. It seems that Shteyngart has deliberately avoided a direct literary representation of what actually informs his novels the most: his identity as a Jewish Russian immigrant in the USA. Instead, his novels are chaotic adventure stories set in a fictitious but recognizable place or time. Yet, that does not mean that the immigrant experience, or the thematic concerns that it entails, are entirely sidetracked in Shteyngart’s fiction. If analyzed from a postmodern perspective, this tension between the pervasive influence of the immigrant experience and the indirect approach to that immigrant experience in literature – this “hide-and-seek game” – is not an isolated idiosyncracy. In this thesis, I have refered a number of times to Jonathan Safran Foer and other contemporary Jewish American postmodern writers whose work is configurated according to what Marianne Hirsch calls ‘postmemory’. Basically, they are playing the same hide- and-seek game as Shteyngart. I have illustrated how Codde refers to a number of postmodern techniques in the fiction of the ‘postmemory writers’, such as layering, traces, myth and story-

346 Satran, no pag.

telling, that account for the avoidance of how it really was. Likewise, Shteyngart somewhat avoids the core of his literary project, as the immigrant experience means to Shteyngart what the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish life and memory over the generations means to Foer. Shteyngart does not stage a traditional Old World to New World immigrant experience in his novels, but he gives the matter of immigration a crucial place in what I have defined as the ‘postmigration’ dimension in his work. In short, the postmigration dimension is a literary device that allows for an ad hoc transformation of the immigrant experience to its ontological core: the confrontation of various ethnic, national and personal identities and mentalities. The disorientation of time and/or place is an essential aspect of postmigration in Shteyngart’s work: the spatiotemporal parameters that define every immigration pattern are taken away in the postmigration dimension so as to ‘free’ the immigrant experience in literature. Whereas the immigrant experience in earlier immigrant fiction (such as the work of Cahan and Antin) was still tightly bound to fixed cultural boundaries and oppositions, the postmigration dimension juxtaposes those opposed identities and mentalities in a single ad hoc setting. These observations led me to conclude that, in Shteyngart’s fiction, identity informs migration. Or, to use Dickstein’s terminology, the geography of the mind informs the geography of the planet, and not the other way around. Because, although a lot of new immigration patterns emerged from the end of the 20 th century onwards (including Shteyngart’ own immigration from the Soviet Union to the USA, for instance), Shteyngart does not represent one of those new patterns in literature. Instead, he aims at the “mental immigrant.” Moreover, the erosion of classic boundaries and immigration patterns, which is the source of inspiration for postmigration, is symbolically hinted at (especially in Shteyngart’s first two novels) through recurring imaginative flights. At numerous points in the stories, the protagonists imagine flying from the Old World to America or back, like in the prologue of Absurdistan .347 Later in the story, Misha explains the symbolic value of these imaginative flights, as they express the immigrant’s fascination for the global post-Cold War era:

You know, this happens a lot to Russians. The Soviet Union is gone, and the borders are as free and passable as they’ve ever been. And yet, when a Russian moves between the two universes, this feeling of finality persists, the logical impossibility of a place like Russia existing alongside the civilized world, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sharing the same atmosphere with, say, Vladivostok. 348

347 ABS , vii – viii 348 ABS , 56

Rebutting the Howe doctrine

I have started this thesis with what in Jewish American studies is commonly referred to as the Howe doctrine. In the introduction, I have brought up an interesting paradox regarding Jewish American life and literature. On the one hand, Howe had good reasons to assume that Jewish American literature was approaching its end, due to the ongoing assimilation of Jews into the American mainstream. Yet, Howe’s predictions proved wrong. Since the end of the 20 th century, several new ‘groups’ or ‘waves’ of successful Jewish American writers have stepped forward whose fiction has reasserted Jewish identity in literature. In this thesis, I have focused on Gary Shteyngart, who draws upon the immigrant experience to renew the Jewish American novel. As I have hopefully made clear, the postmigration concept serves as an interesting analytical tool to grasp the explanation for the Jewish American paradox. Just like postmemory, it allows for a reconsideration of how literature and (ethnic) identity interact. Howe’s major mistake was that he viewed literature as a mirror image of society (and, consequently, identity in literature as a mirror image of identity in society). For Howe, the waning of a distinct Jewish community in the USA would inevitably involve the waning of Jewish American literature. However, by falling back on the immigrant experience and by freeing the immigrant experience of its realistic restrictions, Shteyngart has managed to produce a body of work that reinvests in the assertion of ethnic identity. His postmodern fiction stages identity as a distinct theme in its own right, as identity directly accounts for the setting and the actions in the story. The programmatic importance of the identity permutations in Shteyngart’s work, and not merely the recuperation of the immigrant experience, is what forestalls the criticism expressed the Howe doctrine. The self-consciousness of identity in this kind of literature, also hinted at by Grauer in her article on identity in contemporary Jewish American literature, is probably its strength as well as its weakness. It accounts for many negative points of criticism, such as in Rovner’s scathing article on The Russian Debutante’s Handbook . Rovner accuses Shteyngart of abusing shallow clichés of Jewish identity to assert an essential Jewish Otherness. I have argued that the bulk of Rovner’s accusations are rooted in a misunderstanding of Shteyngart’s identity politics. By explaining the importance of trauma and, especially, irony and parody in Shteyngart’s discourse, I have illustrated how Jewish identity in Shteyngart’s novels serves as a performative, self-conscious action in the postmigration framework. What is more, Shteyngart himself deliberately mocks the ‘game of identities’ in his own fiction, for example by staging a character like professor Jerry Shteynfarb in Absurdistan . The self-

consciousness of identity is expressively foregrounded here. In Super Sad True Love Story , the self- consciousness of literature itself is deployed in a layered narrative structure. As I have concluded in the end of my analysis of Super Sad True Love Story , the novel can be read as a silent attack on the concerns that prompted the Howe doctrine. The emergence of literature as the major source of redemption for Lenny, against the background of a society that approaches ‘the end of identity’, suggests that literature can inspire identity, instead of the other way around. From this point of view, Super Sad True Love Story closely resembles Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated , which expresses the same poetical concern to the utmost. Hence, through this self-consciousness of identity and literature, matters of ethnic (Jewish) identity are given new opportunities to move about freely in literature. In Shteyngart’s work, the focus on the sociological status of Jewishness (which was parodied in the first part of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook ) has given room to a more existential consideration of how Jewish identity influences one’s self-image and how literature might take part in that process. The following quote by Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick expresses how these permutations counter the Howe doctrine:

I always thought that the subject matter would always be there, because the issue is existential, not sociological. Now along comes this next generation of Jewish writers, and sure enough, they are interested in the existential questions of Judaism. It’s very unexpected; if Howe were alive I think he would be amazed. 349

The scope of postmigration

Furthermore, in this thesis, I have analyzed the repercussions of the postmigration dimension on matters of multiculturalism, national identity and politics in the work of Shteyngart. All in all, the political implications, differently embedded in all three novels, remind us that Shteyngart’s immigrant fiction is more than just a game of identities. In The Russian Debutante’s Handbook , the political implications are the least obvious and the least direct. The novel ironically criticizes the debate on multiculturalism and assimilation in the USA rather than expressing political accusations directly. I have talked about meta-criticism in this respect, which is basically the social counterpart of the literary parody of Jewish identity in the first part of the story.

349 Ozick in Royal , 11

In Absurdistan , however, Shteyngart sends out unmistakable political accusations. His take on the politically and economically globalized world, of which Absurdistan is the symbolic capital, boils down to a pamphlet against the war on Iraq and the treacherous profit-making by multinational corporations. More generally, the novel suggests that ethnic oppositions will continue to exist in the global village, but that they will be abused by the elite for socio-economic reasons that have nothing to do with ehtnic identity itself. The references to the 9/11 attacks also add up to this sense of disharmony in the globalized world. On the other hand, I have illustrated how these political implications blend with Misha’s personal identity experiences in the ad hoc postmigration setting of Absurdsvanï. Postmigration in Absurdistan is multidimensional. 350 The assumptions regarding postmigration that I have presented in this thesis have been adjusted in the analysis of Super Sad True Love Story . Although the political implications seem all- American at first sight (given the fact that the vices of American society are recognizably extrapolated in the story) and although the story lacks an actual immigrant experience of the protagonist, the numerous references to (the collapse of) the Soviet Union still account for a continuity with Shteyngart’s two other novels. This led me to conclude that postmigration is not just a literary device in Shteyngart’s fiction, but that it can also be conceived as a poetical foundation of Shteyngart’s fiction. It is Shteyngart’s personal identity as an immigrant (writer) that informs the political pastiche in his novel of ideas.

In their article on Soviet Jewishness and cultural studies, Olga Gershenson and David Shneer confirm Donald Weber’s statement that post-Soviet Jewish writers like Gary Shteyngart are “a fascinating new chapter in a long tradition of Jewish immigrant writing.” 351 They suggest what postmigration is all about:

Post-Soviet Jews, who often maintain multiple passports, multiple homes, and multiple languages, make us re-think the meaning of homeland and exile: are they part of a traditional Jewish diaspora or a new Russian diaspora? Transnational post-Soviet Jews are rapidly becoming one of the most newest and most important subjects of study as Jewish studies become more global. 352

350 I, personally, think of Absurdistan as Shteyngart’s best novel, exactly because of this double focus. 351 Weber, “Permutation,” 2 352 Olga Gershenson and David Shneer, “Soviet Jewishness and Cultural Studies.” Journal of Jewish Identities 4:1 (2011): 129 – 146. Quote on p. 139

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ADDITIONAL INTERNET SOURCES

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On the NYANA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Association_for_New_Americans

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On Halliburton: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton

On Robert Greenwald’s documentary Iraq For Sale : http://www.iraqforsale.org

NOTE: All URLs in this list are last consulted in August 2011.

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