Love like water, love like fire

Iossel (Every Hunter Wants to Know) presents an at times absurdist look at Jewish life in Soviet Russia and the Diaspora in this vibrant collection. In "The Night Andropov Died," an "underground writer" working the night shift as a guard at a Leningrad amusement park hears a Voice of America announcement that Andropov, head of the KGB and successor to Brezhnev, has died, and is stirred by the feeling that change will come. In "Life: How Was It?" two boyhood friends from Leningrad unexpectedly meet as adults at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan and reminisce about the old days, forgetting more painful moments and ending on a note of comic resignation. In the title story, an instant expands to an eternity as a young woman in 1939 waits anxiously for NKVD officers climbing the apartment stairs to take away her husband for being a Jew, despite his "naïve optimism" for "the Great Leader's transcendental supernatural genius." With an ear for the clumsiness of Russian bureaucratic nomenclature, an eye for Kafkaesque humiliations, and a heart that embraces all the paradoxes of being a Soviet Jew, Iossel casts a spell over the reader. Reading like Sholem Aleichem updated by Bruce Jay Friedman, these stories reflect the exciting evolution of Russian Jewish literature. (May)

Autobiographical fiction portrays life in Soviet Russia. Thirty years after the publication of Every Hunter Wants To Know, Iossel, who was born in 1955 and immigrated to the U.S. in 1986, offers another engaging collection of stories evoking his Soviet childhood and young adulthood. Jewish identity is a recurring theme: In "Necessary Evil," parents surprise their 9-year-old son by telling him that he is a Jew. Encouraging him to "embrace it unreservedly, because it defines by far the most important part of you," they assure him that Jews are "covert agents" to promote good in the world. Yet the news is unsettling for a child who sees blatant anti-Semitism everywhere. What if all the Soviet people who deride Jews are right? he wonders. Besides, as the narrator of "The Night We Were Told Brezhnev Was Dead" reflects: "Hardly any one of us knew the first thing about Jewish history or a single word of the Jewish language, which was called Hebrew and was banned from private study." As a Jew, he feels especially vulnerable to the state's repression: "All of us Soviet people existed largely at the mercy of the KGB"--especially Jews. Yet the Soviet Union insisted it was a "society of ultimate justice," in contrast to America, "a dark, dangerous, ominously rumbling, potentially deadly word." America was to be hated, and "ordinary oppressed, exploited, proletarian Americans" were to be pitied. While many stories illuminate the absurdity of Soviet society, Iossel conveys the brutal oppression of the surveillance state most intensely, and hauntingly, in the title story: an internal monologue by a wife fearing that agents have come to arrest her husband in the middle of the night. "Anyone can be disappeared at any time," she thinks, knowing that she will be taken soon after, their orphaned children will be indoctrinated to hate them, and no one will care. Appealing stories bear witness to a dark reality. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.