Soviet-Born

"A long-overdue addition to the scholarly field. . . . Soviet-Born makes a deeply researched and analytically insightful case for the ways in which Soviet-born writing challenges and adds to Jewish American fiction."

~Los Angeles Review of Books

"A Greyhound bus dream of sitting next to Philip Roth who recommends reading Bernard Malamud, an imagined encounter between a Russian-born nurse and Jonathan Safran Foer, and invocations of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anton Chekhov, and Sholem Aleichem. Based on interviews with the authors and careful readings of their works, Karolina Krasuska’s Soviet-Born draws a broad and vividly illustrated panorama of contemporary writing by migrants from the former Soviet Union, challenging comforting American Cold War clichés as well as the narrow norms of generalized Jewish genealogies." ~Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, Harvard University

"Karolina Krasuska’s beautifully written, revelatory study of twenty-first century Soviet-born Jewish writers published in English powerfully rethinks the category of 'Jewish-American literature' to expose its hierarchies and blind spots. Richly informed by critical frameworks from gender, migration, and memory studies, Soviet-Born simultaneously demonstrates the broader resonances of the alternative literary archive it uncovers."

~Sarah Casteel, author of Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art

"Soviet-Born offers an exciting and much-needed reframing of the Jewish American canon. Through thoughtful and theoretically informed close readings, Krasuska elegantly demonstrates how this dynamic and creative generation of Soviet-born immigrant Jewish writers, including Anya Ulinich and David Bezmozgis, challenge the doxa of Jewish American literature, speaking back to its masculinist and nationalist norms." ~Allison Schachter, author of Women Writing Jewish Modernity, 1919-1939