Books

Anya Ulinich
Petropolis (Viking; 2007)
Reviewed by Paul Lembersky



In her delectably bittersweet debut novel Petropolis, the young Russian-American author Anya Ulinich accomplishes the nearly impossible: she convincingly unfolds before the reader a drab picture of the post-Perestroika life in a small Siberian town, in all its squalid glory, and does it while eschewing the well-trodden terrain of the grotesque – a place where many a writer of Eastern European origin seem to have taken permanent residence. On top of that, she manages to hold the proverbial mirror to the bland consumer paradise that is modern-day America and steer clear of caricature or facile generalizations

Leisurely-paced yet bouncy and upbeat, the coming-of-age narrative centers around the life and adventures of the self-styled Homo Post-Sovieticus named Sasha Goldberg, a black Russian Jewish teen mom who is neither quite black, nor very Jewish, nor, for that matter, much of a mother. A perpetual stranger marginalized in her own land, Sasha abandons her newborn baby girl and her art studies and hightails it to the United States, an underage mail-order bride in search of her missing father. As she makes her way from her dreary hometown, Asbestos 2 (formerly known as Stalinsk), to Moscow to Phoenix to Chicago to Brooklyn, Sasha encounters a slew of offbeat characters. One cameo that especially tickled this reviewer is by Igor, a tall, one-armed and actually female skeleton that models for students in the Asbestos 2 art school. Honorable mention must also go to a scenery-chewing group performance by the well-meaning Mr. and Mrs. Sarancha (the name means “locust” in Russian), Mr. and Mrs. Svetlyak (glowworm), and Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Shmel (bumblebee) attending an entomologically flavored fundraiser for the Soviet Jewry at the palatial estate of the wealthy Tarakan (cockroach) family. 

Ms. Ulinich, who grew up in Moscow and immigrated to the United States at the age of 17, attended the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and received her MFA in painting from the University of California at Davis. Not surprisingly, Petropolis is awash in colors and visual details and conceits, i.e. drawing the missing father from memory. It's also rich in allusions to Russian literature, from the title derived from Osip Mandelstam’s poem Tristia to the bucket of sauerkraut that Sasha’s father weighs down with a cellophane-wrapped Complete Biography of Gogol. The Russian part of the novel is digressive, textured and firmly planted in history; in the American part, the narrative voice becomes more idiomatic, terse and short on historical background.

Skillfully – and appropriately – employing a time-honored literary device of ostranenie, or defamiliarization (the tactic of inviting the reader to see things in a strange way, first described by the Russian Formalist critics in the early ’20s), Ms. Ulinich shows the world through the eyes of a misfit. Sasha is at odds with her peers – both in the old country, where she can’t be a Snowflake Fairy in a school play because of dark skin and curly hair she got from her half-black father, but also in America.  Here, the variations on Sasha’s "otherness" are played out in her interactions with a Torah-quoting employer, or the bigotry-spewing Russian émigrés of Coney Island, or the yoga mat-toting, well-heeled young mothers of Park Slope. Anya Ulinich has written a race- and class-conscious novel that entertains and edifies but refrains from label-slinging, and she has executed it with such poise and grace that you forget that English is the author’s second language. That alone is a minor miracle. More importantly, Ms. Ulinich has succeeded in showing how the other half lives with an authenticity and authority befitting a genuinely bicultural writer.