Larisa Vapnyar: From Russia with Relief

By the mid twentieth century, Russian writers who thought about Jewishness tended to see it in one of two ways. The first was as a random identity assignment with fateful existential consequences. The second poses the Jew as a stand-in for the Russian intelligentsia in general. Among diaspora writers of the early twenty-first century, we can see the development of both categories. In works set in immigrant Canada or the United States, Jewish and Russian-intelligentsia identities merge into a label that assumes the bearer will be a stranger to the larger community. Jewish characters are skeptical of that community, but also long to join. From their sidelines, they are skeptical also of themselves.

Larisa Vapnyar explores this historical arc with exceptional subtlety and warmth. Her 2005 story “There are Jews in my house” examines the collapse of a friendship between two women, a Russian and a Jew, in an occupied town during World War II. The psychological and class manifestations of ethnicity, ignored in good times, become overwhelming as one of those ethnicities turns out to carry a death sentence. Vapnyar’s 2016 novel Still Here is similarly preoccupied with shifting allegiances among friends, and also with death. But the twenty-first century world it portrays is infinitely kinder. The Jewish background of some characters carries no meaning at all, beyond the acknowledgment of a certain factual reality. Russians and Jews have merged without a trace, diaspora travelers in a new community that is deservedly satirized, but also quite benign.