Escaping Jewishness: Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

The hero of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Vladimir Girshkin, negotiates Russian, Soviet, and Jewish identities, as a self-proclaimed “beta immigrant” attempting to assimilate to American culture. Critics of the novel disagree on the degree of his success. Morris Dickstein and Menachem Feuer interpret Girshkin as a schlemiel who rises above his lowly station to gain a measure of the acceptance he craves; Natalie Friedman, however, claims that nostalgia for the Soviet Union prevents him from becoming fully American. I will argue that Girshkin’s Jewish identity, although he emphasizes it less than his Russian identity, represents the more troubling of the two. Several characters in the novel repeatedly remind him of his Jewish origins, including his mother, fellow Soviet immigrant Rybakov, his girlfriend Francesca, who notes his resemblance to Trotsky, Jewish-American émigrés in Prava, members of the Groundhog’s organization, and the skinheads who attack him. During a visit to Auschwitz, he sums up his grandmother’s lesson as “run, before the goyim get you.” Significantly, despite his apparent success by the end of the novel – a law career in Cleveland and marriage to the non-Jewish Morgan – Girshkin still longs to join “the simple brotherhood of America’s white men,” a status perhaps precluded more by his Jewishness than his Russian origin. His experience as a Jew, as much as his status as an immigrant, leaves the reader unsure whether Girshkin can ever fully assimilate. Being Jewish represents a burden that he would like to escape and ignore, but cannot.