Yelena Akhtiorskaya - “Reading Akhtiorskaya's tale of two cities is a high-impact verbal workout that may leave you breathless.

Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Panic in a Suitcase, Riverhead, 2014.


excerpt


In this account of two decades in the life of an immigrant household, the fall of communism and the rise of globalization are artfully reflected in the experience of a single family. Ironies, subtle and glaring, are revealed: the Nasmertovs left Odessa for Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with a huge sense of finality, only to find that the divide between the old world and the new is not nearly as clear-cut as they thought. The dissolution of the Soviet Union makes returning just a matter of a plane ticket, and the Russian-owned shops in their adopted neighborhood stock even the most obscure comforts of home. Pursuing the American Dream once meant giving up everything, but does the dream still work if the past is always within reach?
If the Nasmertov parents can afford only to look forward, learning the rules of aspiration, the family’s youngest, Frida, can only look back.
In striking, arresting prose loaded with fresh and inventive turns of phrase, Yelena Akhtiorskaya has written the first great novel of Brighton Beach: a searing portrait of hope and ambition, and a profound exploration of the power and limits of language itself, its ability to make connections across cultures and generations.



From Nell Zink to Catherine Lacey to Yelena Akhtiorskaya: this was not only the year of the debut, it was the year of the debut of tantalizing sentences — except that Akhtiorskaya’s are the best of the bunch. She understands that great prose has zero to do with experimentation for experimentation’s sake. Instead, each of Akhtiorskaya’s often hilarious sentences is a world unto itself. And what a world to discover in 2014.  - flavorwire.com/493337/the-best-novels-of-2014/view-all


Marvelous...With beautiful prose that often feels like poetry, Akhtiorskaya portrays America from an outsider s perspective while revealing the collective truths about families no matter where they live...A touching and darkly funny first novel that is sure to be adored by readers everywhere. Very highly recommended. Library Journal 


Given current events, Akhtiorskaya’s debut—concerning an immigrant family’s ambivalent ties to America and those who choose to stay behind in Ukraine—could not be more timely.
As the novel opens in 1993, Esther and Robert Nasmertov, once highly respected doctors in Odessa, have been settled for two years in the Russian/Ukrainian Jewish enclave of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where their medical practices have dwindled and they struggle with their own health problems. Living with them are their chunky, sullen 10-year-old granddaughter, Frida, her mother, Marina (the Nasmertovs' daughter), who cleans houses for wealthier Jews and eventually becomes a nurse, and her low-level computer-tech husband, Levik. Absent is Esther and Robert’s son, Pasha, an up-and-coming poet. A convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, he remains in Odessa with his wife and adolescent son. When Esther is diagnosed with cancer, Marina arranges for Pasha to visit. Akhtiorskaya’s set-piece descriptions of his monthlong stay—a family beach outing; a birthday weekend in a cramped lake cabin; a literary soiree—are drawn with sharp humor, telling character sketches and sensory flamboyance. Esther, Robert and Marina want Pasha, whom they all consider helpless and hapless, to stay in America where they can take care of him. Pasha is put off by what he sees as Brighton Beach’s second-rate version of Odessa, but he enjoys Manhattan's expat literary social life. Cut to 2008. Word comes to Brooklyn that Pasha’s son is engaged. Frida, thinner but still sullenly unhappy, decides to attend the wedding and receives a less-than-enthusiastic welcome to Odessa. Divorced and remarried to a woman he met in New York, Pasha has become a literary lion based on the work he published (and Frida never bothered to read) shortly after his visit to America 15 years ago. As Akhtiorskaya showed America through Pasha’s eyes, she now offers Frida’s vision of Crimea as chaotic, decrepit, yet enticingly surreal.
Akhtiorskaya’s sideways humor allows rays of genuine emotion to filter through the social and domestic satire. - Kirkus Reviews

A mercilessly funny debut novel about a Russian family washing up, and out, in America. Yelena Akhtiorskaya seems helplessly bound to deliver the truth, in perfect prose, about our families, wherever they are from. She is a tremendously good new writer. - Ben Marcus

 This is not only a wise, funny novel; it feels like the beginning of a thrilling career. Yelena Akhtiorskaya's sentences plunge the reader headlong into the energy, anxiety, frailty, and love of the Nasmertov family of Brooklyn and Odessa. She finds poetry in clamor and disorder, and she sees her characters from every angle, with a rare mix of clarity and compassion. -  Chad Harbach

Sentence after sentence, Panic in a Suitcase is infused with humor and poetry, as Akhtiorskaya's characters emerge beautiful and hilarious and splendorous in all their failings. Her language and intelligence achieve what only great literature can do: transform what you know and love into something strange and new, making the world realign itself according to the writer's sensibility. I'd read a take-out menu written by Yelena Akthiorskaya, but Panic in a Suitcase is a humbling, astonishing debut. Get to it as soon as you can. -  Aleksandar Hemon

I think Yelena Akhtiorskaya is a genius. What she manages to do, linguistically and emotionally, in the span of a single sentence, is astonishing. -  Keith Gessen

Yelena Akhtiorskaya creates a beautifully precise and vibrant world populated by touching, funny, unforgettable characters. A true joy to read. --Lara Vapnyar




The Ukrainian Jewish family featured in this hilarious debut leaves Odessa for Brooklyn in 1991. They include renowned doctor Robert Nasmertov; his daughter, Marina; who finds work cleaning houses for wealthy American Jews; and her nine-year-old daughter, Frida. However, Robert’s son, Pasha, a brilliant poet but a totally incapable human being, never emigrates, visiting his family only occasionally. In 2008, the adult Frida goes to see him and discovers that he has become “more alienated and excluded in his native city than his family in their new land.” Akhtiorskaya’s take on how family members manipulate and fail each other is spot-on, with Pasha and Frida both disappointing their family in different ways: he converts to Christianity; she begins medical school but drops out. The prose is finely crafted, but this is not a tale of relatable people. Instead, Akhtiorskaya excels at humorous, slightly overstated character sketches, making each person uniquely absurd. - Publishers Weekly



Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s impressive debut novel, “Panic in a Suitcase,” considers the precarious position of émigrés ­trying to build a life in America — specifically, Ukrainian émigrés trying to build a life in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach. Set there and in Odessa, Ukraine, the novel spans 15 years in the lives of the Nasmertov family. It opens in 1993 as Pasha, the only remaining family member in Odessa, visits Brighton Beach to see his cancer-stricken mother, the matriarch of the family. Pasha — sometimes called “the greatest poet not just in Odessa and not in all of Ukraine but in all of Russia” — is a beacon for his family, much to the curiosity of his young niece, Frida. Though the first half of the novel centers on the family’s attempt to coerce Pasha into moving to America, this beautifully drawn portrait of a splintered ­immigrant family is also about young ­Frida and her struggle to assimilate. Akhtiorskaya layers the novel with equal parts humor and anxiety, and expertly highlights the unease of having one foot in and one foot out of the old country.

It can be said there are two kinds of immigrants: those who leave behind their homeland and embrace America full-throttle, and those who long for home and migrate into a facsimile community in their adopted land. Both are a matter of survival, though no one has yet proved which is more effective in staving off the psychic pull of one’s native country. Akhtiorskaya writes about people resisting assimilation. She crawls down the streets of Brighton Beach’s thriving Russian community, through the hallways of apartment buildings full of refugees from Odessa, and captures the beauty in Brooklyn’s surrogate Black Sea town. The book succeeds, phenomenally, at presenting the immigrant duality within the Nasmertov family. When Pasha’s visa lapses, the family heaves a collective sigh of relief, knowing they will keep their tenuous connection to Odessa and their claim on the country home. With Pasha forever linked to the homeland, “Odessa remained theirs. This sense of retention, of not ­having exchanged or betrayed but simply enlarged in scope, kept virulent immigrant manias at bay.” They will always have an escape plan, just in case.

“Panic in a Suitcase” also raises the question: Is it better to stay in one’s home country and thrive, or come to America to struggle and possibly hit it bigger? The constant need to be upwardly mobile, to impress family members and ­acquaintances who stayed behind, proves exhausting. This drive to succeed — to be the better immigrant, the best assimilator — is neatly embodied in a secondary character, Pasha’s dubiously talented friend who left Odessa for the East Village. Their reunion, full of cringe-worthy humor, makes the novel as much about the struggle of artists as the struggle of immigrants.

When the book rejoins the Nasmertovs in 2008, Frida is buckling under the weight of the family’s pressure to succeed. On a break from medical school, she goes in search of herself in Odessa, booking a flight to attend her cousin’s wedding. What she finds is that her mysterious poet uncle, though hailed as “the Brodsky of our time” at Odessa dinner parties, is also aged, out of touch and past his prime. Frida, alienated, struggles with the pull of a place she hardly knows, a place so built up in her family’s imagination there is no way it can live up to the mythology. When Frida travels to the countryside to find her family’s vacation home (which Pasha has given away to his ex-wife), she finds the dacha nothing more than a pile of rubble.

The relationships Akhtiorskaya mines are fascinating and tender, her writing crisp and gorgeous in its ability to capture gnawing attempts to piece together an immigrant identity. “Panic in a Suitcase” is a rewarding biography of displacement, where those left behind are often as disconnected as those who flee for an elusive better life elsewhere. - KAROLINA WACLAWIAK

Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s brilliant and often funny first novel, “Panic in a Suitcase,” begins in 1993, with the Nasmertovs of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, receiving a visit from their son, Pasha, the last family member still living in Ukraine. After a long bout of travel, he’s weary and reluctant to tag along on a walk to the ocean.

Pasha, Ms. Akhtiorskaya writes, has the constitution “of a poet — sickly from the outset, the dysfunction lying in the vital organs (heart, lungs), nose and ears disproportionately large for the head, head abnormally large for the body, premature stains under the eyes, spooky immobility of gaze, vermicelli limbs, metabolic peculiarities.”

Though boyish in his sulky, daydreamy demeanor, Pasha is nearing 40, with a wife and teenage son back in Odessa, where his debut collection of poetry is slowly attracting warm reviews.

In a post-Soviet world, he’s not motivated to emigrate, but his doting mother, Esther, campaigns for him to join the family in New York full time. “You can sit on the sofa in the corner,” she tells him. “No one will bother you. We just want to look at you.”

But even Esther views a possible move with some ambivalence, there being an undeniable appeal to having strongholds in both countries. Pasha’s apartment back home is in a prime location, and he spends summers at the family’s dacha. The Nasmertovs take solace in the way this arrangement keeps them feeling firmly tied to their origins.

Though the book leans on autobiography — Ms. Akhtiorskaya, who was born in 1985, moved with her family from Ukraine to Brighton Beach in 1992 — it has been transformed into the kind of fiction that is richer than real life. Whatever personal details she has marshaled have been charged with consistently imaginative language and great verve.

The first half of the novel recounts Pasha’s two trips to Brooklyn, one year apart. The second half vaults forward to 2008, when his niece Frida now 25 and between semesters at medical school, visits Pasha in Ukraine, or, “the land of ambiguous lung disease,” as she sees it. “People with a cough graduated to a hacking cough, people with a hacking cough advanced to emphysema, those with emphysema hacked their last.”

Despite all the labored breathing, Frida is tempted to stay in the country, the way previous generations of the family had been seduced by America. The book complicates the push and pull of home, and the idea of starting over. Pasha sees Brighton Beach as a pale facsimile of the real city from which the family moved, “a tiny nook at the very rear of someone else’s crumbling estate.”

The book wears its deeper insights about belonging lightly. We’re told that Esther’s “allegiance was foremost to humor,” and the same could be said of Ms. Akhtiorskaya. Comparisons to Gary Shteyngart are inevitable, but Ms. Akhtiorskaya is less antic, her satirical vision of domestic life gentle at its core. Ridiculous things happen to these characters — Pasha’s bathing suit is stripped off him during a turbulent storm — but a fundamental decency abides, especially in Pasha’s parents.

Esther’s maternal instincts are set to stun. (“If not for her, they’d be scavenging garbage dumps for carrot shavings.”) She’s first up in the morning to work in the house, even while she’s being treated for breast cancer, and is so tough that she asks for “more chemo, stronger radiation, additional sessions.”

Her husband, Robert, had been a leading clinical neurologist back home and became less robust after immigrating. (“Every surface that had been convex had concaved, as if a vacuum cleaner had turned on at his core.”) Even when he transgresses — posing as Pasha in correspondence with a scholar, hoping to have his son’s poems translated into English — it’s with good intentions.

“Panic in a Suitcase” is composed of leisurely episodes, but Ms. Akhtiorskaya’s prose keeps the pace moving as quickly as any suspenseful plot could. On every page, she writes about people and things with close attention. Books lined up in a store are “all equally pristine, waiting not too eagerly to be chosen. They seemed to boast of a system of self-grooming, like cats.” Misha, a formerly close friend of Pasha, “tried to live as if his life were a success, which inevitably led to discrepancies and incongruities. Reality was a bad choice of enemy.” Pasha’s conversion from Judaism to Russian Orthodoxy “was bound to remain an open wound on the family flesh, susceptible to infection.”

In an interview about the novel, Ms. Akhtiorskaya expressed a desire for her next book to “have nothing at all to do with my life” and be “just as far as possible away from my family.” This sparkling debut, though it stays close to home, suggests she can roam wherever she’d like. - JOHN WILLIAMS

Like some traditional Russian meals, Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s debut novel “Panic in a Suitcase” is a matter of many courses. And like those feasts, it’s worth slogging through (the caviar and vodka are great in that country, but the main dishes can be overcooked) for dessert. Reaching the end is worth the journey, though the trip can be taxing.
“Panic in a Suitcase” is a dense, baroque fiction about the Nasmertov family in its native Odessa and in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, its more challenging, if more promising, new home. It’s a lyrical, funny and scattered novel.The Nasmertov around whom “Panic” revolves is Pavel Robertovich, or Pasha, a neurasthenic poet of girth, hypochondria and appetite. Pasha’s sister, the thrifty Marina, deplores his lack of ambition; Frida, Marina’s restless daughter (and likely an autobiographical ringer for the author herself), admires her uncle. The relationship between Frida and Pasha is among the more deftly crafted plot lines in this complicated, occasionally vexing book.
“Panic” spans 20 years in exploring cities with much in common: a seaside locale, retail as Russian in Brooklyn as in Ukraine, close-knit, cramped Jewish families, a fatalistic but nourishing sense of humor.
While there is much to admire, particularly the language, Ms. Akhtiorskaya overstuffs her book, tracking one person, then another, then a third. The characters are well developed, but the frequent shifts in focus and viewpoint hobble the book’s drive.
I read this with interest and admiration — Ms. Akhtiorskaya, who is under 30, writes like an old soul, making “Panic” a weird contemporary take on the classic Russian novel — but felt a bit lost if I put it down for a few days. Still, it always drew me back in.
Launched with Pasha’s first visit to the United States, capped by the imminent Odessa wedding of Pasha’s son Sanya (whom we never get to know), “Panic” attempts to bridge the gap between the old (Odessa) and the new (Brighton Beach). Ms. Akhtiorskaya clearly feels at home in both.
Frida, too, feels at home, as in a gathering in Brighton Beach, where Frida meets a friend and unwinds, plopping herself into a beanbag chair:
“The other beanbag chairs were occupied by youngish intellectual types who exhibited in equal measure Odessa humor, Petersburg interests (sans pretensions), Moscow cosmopolitanism (without the coarseness of hard consonants), and New York transit proficiency; who watched Tarnovsky films and played chess (and would finally succeed in teaching her how); who listened to Pink Floyd and Vysotsky and could recite whole stanzas of Eugene Onegin but never went on too long doing so, choosing instead to dance a little, European style, inside the beanbag fortress; who had jobs in the sciences but whose passions lay in art and literature; who got together every weekend in a casual but never obligatory manner and considered this gang, this kompaniya of theirs, a second family, sort of the way her parents considered their kompaniya.”
There’s a whole social milieu here. There’s also a very long sentence. The two speak to Ms. Akhtiorskaya’s gift — and to what complicates the book.
Ms. Akhtiorskaya can be funny, too, which helps. When Frida arrives in Odessa for Sanya’s wedding, her half-brother Volk meets her at the airport. The airport is challenging:
“Her heart intensified its drum as she charged at the automatic doors separating her from Odessa air, like Moses marching at a sea that didn’t split. Momentum brought her cheek up against the glass. Peeling herself off, she stepped back, dumbstruck. Volk whipped out a pocketknife. He inserted the blade into a crack between doors and flipped his wrist, creating a space that his fingers could squeeze through, and proceeded to very unautomatically pry apart the doors.”
“Panic in a Suitcase” effectively paints the picture of family that is anything but smooth, and for the most part, Ms. Akhtiorskaya’s unique linguistic gifts reflect and even illuminate her rough-textured worlds. - Carlo Wolff


Looking at the title of Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s debut novel and learning that the book is about the checkered fortunes of a family from Odessa, we could be forgiven for thinking that the author has utilized the ongoing drama in her native Ukraine as a backdrop. In fact, the panic in “Panic in a Suitcase” refers not to the current political crisis but to the perennial trials of the immigrant experience. Akhtiorskaya’s Russians are not land-grabbing invaders but land-seeking settlers who have traded the crumbling Soviet Union for an uncomplicated enclave of Brooklyn. As old world collides with new, Akhtiorskaya constructs an impressive tragicomedy about culture shock, integration and the tangle of family bonds.
The family in question is the Nasmertovs. In the first of two sections we follow them in Brighton Beach in 1993. Robert, Esther and their daughter, Marina, have called the United States home for two years. They welcome prodigal son and brother Pasha, who has arrived from Odessa for a short stay. Pasha is very much the black sheep: a poet and dreamer, averse to life decisions and heavyweight discussions, and the only family member who has renounced his Jewishness and refused to leave the motherland to tap into the American dream.
In the second section it is 2008, and the youngest Nasmertov, Marina’s teenage daughter, Frida, has flown to Odessa to attend a cousin’s wedding. A simple but effective framework emerges: Akhtiorskaya’s novel is a tale of two cities seen from two outsider perspectives.
Pasha explores Brooklyn, noting that an “odor of derangement hung about Brighton.” Odessa for Frida is bustling, chaotic and frustrating. At this point her Uncle Pasha, now 50, is an acclaimed poet and on his second marriage. Out is “the cold, insane, pasty, pear-shaped, droopy-haired Northern Nadia”; in is new love Sveta, a woman Pasha wooed with “antique ivory incense canisters, a bag of cotton balls, and a used toaster.”
Which leads to Akhtiorskaya’s comic touch. Despite the seriousness that imbues deaths in the family and problems with acclimatization, we are never far from sardonic asides (Pasha won’t meet Frida from the plane because “Russian poets didn’t do airport pickups”) or witty aperçus (“Headaches were like electronics-store fliers — you had one before you realized you had one”). Equally good are Akhtiorskaya’s many dizzying locutions and descriptions that are redolent of early Nabokov: a boy’s eyes are “eerily striking, like toxic sunsets over polluted waters.”
It is perhaps just as well we have this humor and bravura wordplay because Akhtiorskaya’s plot comprises only a string of observations and incidents: a tornado interrupting a day on the beach; mother and daughter in a banya; father and son stuck in the middle of a lake in a rowing boat without an oar. Fortunately, her rich language and ideas sublimate the mundane — “the katastrofa that is everyday life” — into something very special indeed. - Malcolm Forbes

1.
One morning a few months ago, I purchased a large coffee from a small boutique café in Prospect Heights, took the Q line from 7th Avenue 15 stops into Brooklyn and half an hour later was standing on a boardwalk sipping the coffee in what might as well have been a different country, but wasn’t — it was Brighton Beach. Old men in undershirts and short shorts sat on benches eating cold cuts; middle-aged, heavily made-up women in neon jogging suits strode past, smoking and speaking Russian; balding men in leather jackets sat on restaurant porticos with beer or bottles of vodka on ice; small children wandered by. To my right, the buildings and playground were nondescript concrete creations. To my left, the dome of the sky was azure and unclouded, the beach and ocean sparkled bright white in the sunlight. The air had the curt, chilled undertow of early April. So did the people.
I’d come to Brighton, the city’s epicenter for Eastern Europeans who’d emigrated after the fall of the Soviet Union, to get interviews for a piece I was writing about anti-Putin activism, but no one would talk. Not the two Ukrainian girls standing outside a restaurant; not the Estonian women in the VHS section of the Russian-language bookshop; not even the heavy blonde Moldovan waitress who gave me my only quote, which was actually an anti-quote: “It’s very quiet here, no one cares about politics. For that, go to Manhattan. This is Brighton Beach.” The immigrant community was separate and impenetrable; a strange land of the old and young, of retro leather jackets and cigarettes, of alarmingly bright, open skies and beaches; none of it quite real to someone like me, at least compared to the roiling intensity of life in millennial Brooklyn.
Yet “roiling” exactly describes Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s Panic in a Suitcase, a novel of Brighton Beach and Odessa set in 1993 and 2008. Akhtiorskaya, a Columbia University MFA graduate who emigrated from Odessa in 1992, aged seven, is not interested in Brighton Beach’s sociology. She’s interested in the domestic life of three generations of a single immigrant family living there. It’s this route — from the inside out — that she takes to drag the churning hopes, terrors, delusions, and disillusions of emigration in late-capitalist America to the surface. Her subject isn’t Brighton Beach’s glassy beaches and ocean, or its smoky avenues and social distinctions, it’s the place’s id.
2.
The specimen family, the Nasmertovs, are impressively credentialed Ukrainian Jews: father Robert is a retired surgeon and his wife, Esther, a former pediatrician; their son, Pasha, is an impoverished but respected poet in his late 30s; daughter Marina is pursuing a degree in nursing and her husband, Litvak, tolerated mostly for his practicality, is a junior level computer programmer. The family has already decided that Marina and Litvak’s young daughter, Frida, will attend Harvard Medical School. Credentials aside, their social strategies with each other are familiar ones: the overbearing mother infiltrating every corner of her son’s life with mixed success; the recessive father currying secret hopes for his children; the talented, self-obsessed older son; the responsible, resentful younger daughter and her subpar husband; and the loved yet half-neglected grandchild, repository of the family’s American dreams, nursing her own quiet grievances.
These are relationships heightened by extreme dislocation: two years into the United States, the Nasmertovs are so deeply uprooted that they’re functioning based on vestigial impulses they rarely question. “Until two years ago,” for instance, “the future of Odessa had been in Esther’s hands — all the children were under her care.” Now “the phone calls weren’t for Esther, but she answered anyway and attended to household duties as if they were children with fevers and murky urine, hoping to show how irreplaceable she was.” Similarly, the driving action in Part One, set in 1993, is the family’s efforts to lure Pasha, still living in the family dacha in Ukraine, to America, even though, in their quieter moments, they’re not sure if they even want him there: wouldn’t it be easier for him to stay in Odessa, preserving their peace of mind that home still exists?
Akhtioriskaya reworks these familiar conflicts and personalities into a series of intricately rendered, unpredictably plotted, bitingly ironic set pieces: a day at the beach that ends in a storm; a weekend trip to the countryside where Pasha and Robert strand themselves on a lake; a surreal drinking session with a Harvard professor who’s translated some of Pasha’s poetry and whom the family hopes will secure Frida a spot there in 10 years. Each event careens close to disaster, as the characters spiral into their private irritations and second-thoughts, mostly to conceal the fact that they have no idea of how they ended up in this mess. But the pervading sense of drift, a constant of their new life, hits unexpectedly, in quiet moments, before they can defend themselves. Frida, bathing, suddenly thinks that “the walls of the bathtub were rounded and white like distant mountains” and “for a moment she felt as if her surroundings were open and vast, in contrast to her days, which were crowded with buildings and shadows.”
Like her characters’ mentalities, the world Akhtiorskaya depicts is a jumbled yet mechanistic one, full of tumultuous activity that ends up signifying nothing at all, for instance the storm on the beach:
The rest of the world disappeared. People gathered, grabbed, collected. The sky, done stewing, began to crumble on raw, sunburned shoulders. Hunks of ice the size of pinecones. The more it came down, the darker the sky turned, like those who grow angrier as they rage.
But the storm “burned itself out in less than half an hour.” This, at maximal metaphorical velocity, is Akhtiorskaya’s worldview, or at least her view of emigration in late 20th-century America. Everything feels significant, but, in practice, life is cyclical rather than linear: storms come, storms go, aspirations don’t become reality and personalities don’t improve, they just flat-line.
3.
Flat-lining is the status quo at the book’s halfway point, which begins in 2008. Crumbling Old World Odessa is capitalizing under the direction of the oligarchs while New World America is meritocratized and corporatized, the children of the upper-middle class prospering while everyone else struggles for health insurance and watches TV. In neither place is there space for new arrivals or old hangers-on to forge lasting communities or satisfying careers. In place of the ideal, Akhtiorskaya’s characters have settled for provisional satisfactions and certainties. Romantic Pasha clings to the vanishing old world in Odessa; practical Marina looks for satisfaction in shorter-term American aspirations, like a day at the spa; and 23-year-old Frida, who doesn’t like medicine, attends a small medical school in the middle of nowhere.
This halfway mark is also the point where the stakes of the novel clarify. In Part One, panic overwhelms everything: the characters’ emotions are extreme and understandable, but their individual psychologies remain blurred. In Part Two, 15 years removed from the shocks and illusions of emigration, the Nasmertovs can begin to take stock of what to do next in these strangely changing worlds. Pasha and Frida step to the fore, guiding the novel with the perceptions of an accomplished, disillusioned artist and a barometrically sensitive 23 year old. If Part One was a necessarily disjointed chronicle of alienation, Part Two is about the struggle for connection and, more interestingly, about the kinds of connection we can and can’t expect from people. Frida, for example, will always have her mother Marina’s love, but her mother was the same person who forced her into medical school: for salvation from that particular fate, she needs to strike out on her own, or form a new bond.
Frida’s presence hints at the other reason the book gains strength in its second half. Akhtiorskaya, the watchful 29 year old on the back jacket, was a fully aware human being in 2008, whereas her knowledge of what it was like to come to America in 1993, when she was eight, would have come mainly secondhand. Her distance shows: younger Pasha and Marina and Robert and Esther never quite transcend their quirks to become fully realized human beings. But shortcomings like this are the unavoidable cost of the book’s ambition, which is seismic: crystallizing the experience of three generations, two countries, and an overlooked immigrant community in 300 pages of muscular, unpredictable prose.
The obvious corollary for a book of this scope and subject is the work of Junot Diaz, which details the overlooked Dominican American diaspora to Washington Heights and back to the Dominican Republic. But Akhtiorskiya’s approach to immigrants commuting between homogenizing homelands is less assured and less brutal: her descriptions are more intricate, her characters’ resentments more tempered, her conclusions less definitive. She doesn’t foreclose the possibilities of finding satisfaction in or between these worlds, as Diaz sometimes seems on the verge of doing. She just indicates that, in this age, the route is more loaded with ambiguities and caveats than an outside observer could possibly imagine. When I think of this book, running parallel in my mind is the placid, exotic, almost sentimental otherworldliness of the Brighton Beach I thought I’d found. The truth of the place is, like all of our truths, more alive and much stranger. - Matthew Wolfson

Panic in a Suitcase is the story of Ukrainian immigrants who come to the United States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but it would be reductive to call Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s extraordinary debut a traditional immigrant novel. Historically, immigrant novels have tended to be about motion, transition, adjustment. In The Rites of Passage, anthropologist Arnold van Gennup explained major life transitions as occurring in a three-fold progression. The first stage is separation, a departure from the familiar: You leave home, are forced out of childhood, change status. The last stage describes ownership and assimilation: you take office, mature, discover that a once new and strange place is now home. These first and last phases possess a measure of stability due to their clarity of purpose: Each describes a leaving and an arriving. The middle—the “liminal” stage—is, for Gennep, more ambiguous, containing traces of both what’s to come and what’s been left behind. Immigrant narratives often enact this tripartite model, emphasizing the peril and meaningfulness of each stage. They seek to pass by, to overcome, the ambiguous middle.
Akhtiorskaya, on the other hand, takes it as her main subject. Panic in a Suitcase is set in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach—nicknamed “Little Odessa”—where a simulacrum of home is manufactured and contained at the edge of the Atlantic. Thanks to economic globalization, her characters are able to configure their newfound neighborhood much in the style of the ones they left behind. Immigrants have always brought the customs of their place of origin to their new home. But the modern immigrant is able to keep accessing home, and the increasing ease of this results, it seems, in a peculiar type of stasis. Ethnographer Victor Turner famously characterized liminal personae, or “threshold people” (the term “liminality” comes from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold”), as being “betwixt and between.” Akhtiorskaya’s characters exist permanently in the liminal phase of a life transition, and find themselves in an intermediate space between cultural practices, laws, conventions; they are stuck in the act of not-yet-arriving.
In 1993, the Nasmertov family—save Pasha, the last close relative still living in Odessa—have lived in Brooklyn for seven hundred and thirty days. They’ve forgotten why they keep count of their time away from Ukraine, but continue nonetheless, as if counting keeps the sensation of permanent Brooklyn residence at bay. When the Nasmertovs arrive in Brooklyn, they are both home and not: “The food on the table was identical to the food on the table in the kitchen in the apartment in the building in the city in the oblast in the republic in the Union they were prepared never to see again.” There’s a lie at both ends of that sentence—the cream herring they eat in Brighton Beach may look and taste identical to what they’d eat in Odessa, but it isn’t the same. Now it represents something new: what they are not eating, what they are not trying, what separates them from their new landscape. All of this makes the claim at the end of the sentence a false reassurance; they may have been prepared to leave the city limits of Odessa, but they’ve brought all they can with them.
When Pasha arrives in Brooklyn for a month-long visit, the discomfort of the ersatz-Odessa is made clearer through his perspective: 
Eyes glued to the window, Pasha’s first impression had been horror. . . . His fellow countrymen hadn’t ventured bravely into a new land, they’d borrowed a tiny nook at the very rear of someone else’s crumbling estate to make a tidy replication of the messy, imperfect original they’d gone through so many hurdles to escape, imprisoning themselves in their own lack of imagination, forgetting that the original had come about organically and proceeded to evolve, already markedly different from their poor-quality photocopy.
If in the first stage of a transition one is full of expectation and in the final stage the expectations are realized, then the liminal phase is marked by the twin emotions of desire and disappointment, which feed off each other cyclically. The Nasmertovs have desires that don’t correlate with the reality they must endure, but that gap alone is not what causes their disappointment. Their new reality appears riddled with an artificiality that causes a specific disappointment. Will their lives never regain the authenticity of the one they’ve left behind? The Great American Family Vacation, for example, turns out to be less than the brochures have promised. Advertised as “in the vicinity” of Lake George, the family’s rented cabin is a four-hour walk from the water. The cottage oozes impersonal impermanence—“fake wood paneling, Formica countertops, a neutral blur of smothered smells, deflated polyester comforters whose floral pattern mirrored the sensibly sized nature paintings”—and Lake George turns out to be not much more than a “bathtub of . . . snot-faced kids.” The main problem is, of course, that the cabin isn’t their dacha and Lake George isn’t the Black Sea.
Many of the family’s desires center around Pasha. He may be the family’s great hapless one, but he is also the family’s Great Poet. His imagined imminent literary renown is his father’s longest-running fantasy. When a scholar from Harvard seeks out Pasha in hopes of translating his poems, Pasha’s nonchalance sends the family into a frenzy. Pasha’s father, Robert, corresponds with the scholar, believing that he is securing fame and a future lecturer position for Pasha and entrance to Harvard for the youngest Nasmertov, Frida. The correspondence causes Robert to manifest “such outward symptoms as an acute mailbox fixation,” but the scholar turns out to be a nobody, a mere “chopstick of a man.” The translated text is never completed, no publisher is hooked, no job offered to Pasha, and, despite his promises, the scholar has no pull with the undergraduate admissions committee. Similar disappointments await Pasha as he tentatively enters New York’s émigré literary scene. What should feel like home—his countrymen banded together through shared artistic impulses—ends up being yet another the site of tremendous fakery.
The thoughts of the individual Nasmertovs are revealed through a roving free indirect eye that sees into the mind of one character after another. Akhtiorskaya uses no quotation marks and often forgoes speech tags that would name which member of the Nasmertov clan is saying each line. The result is the cultivation of a familial voice that belongs to them all, unifies them. Sometimes, the absence of quotation marks makes it hard to tell if certain lines are being spoken aloud or not. The tactic creates another liminal layer, this time in the mind of the reader.
Yet as Akhtiorskaya leads her readers into the unknown, she grounds them with precise physical description. She is an expert noticer. To take just one instance: “An odor of derangement hung about Brighton, wafting extra from under the train tracks. There were too many instances of household appliances used as hats, baby carriages with things other than babies in them, heated conversations with a sole visible party.” The combination of dislocation and precision is, perhaps, the best among the many gifts this book bestows. The effect is the engaging and suspenseful revealing of a world as one author sees it. Akhtiorskaya's noticing is generous; she leads, but doesn’t push, allowing readers to see things for themselves, to notice a world alongside her. - Chloé Cooper Jones

In the midst of so much gloom, a little happy news out of Ukraine: Yelena Akhtiorskaya can’t resolve the separatist crisis or repel Vladimir Putin, but this 28-year-old writer from Odessa subordinates the violence of nations for a moment and offers the balm of laughter. Her first novel, “Panic in a Suitcase,” is equal parts borscht stew and Borscht Belt — an immigration comedy that can’t tell whether it’s leaving or coming to America.
For a country of great comics, we could still use more comic novels, so it’s encouraging to see free trade at work here. Like the Russian-born writer Gary Shteyngart, Akhtiorskaya was raised in the United States, but her prose retains a Slavic accent and sense of humor pickled in Eastern European endurance.
The Nasmertovs, the family at the center of “Panic in a Suitcase,” have been in Brooklyn for 715 days. “They were still counting,” the narrator notes, “though it was getting less clear to what end.” Three generations of them arrived in 1991, full of hope, ready to be dazzled by the New World. But instead, “they’d borrowed a tiny nook at the very rear of someone else’s crumbling estate to make a tidy replication of the messy, imperfect original they’d gone through so many hurdles to escape, imprisoning themselves in their own lack of imagination.”
This is the great immigrant story drained of its inspirational hype. Still clinging tenuously to Odessa, the Nasmertovs experience the American Dream on Ambien — a groggy sleepwalk through one surreal absurdity after another. Doctors and computer programmers back in Ukraine, these family members — blessed only with “a reserve of relentless, pestering doubt” — find themselves in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, at the bottom of a stagnant economy, “decorating lamp shades with beads.”
Not that their new home is all bad. “There were undeniable charms,” Akhtiorskaya writes, “for example the little grandmas selling prescription pills and old furs on the corner, the physics professor with his pile of used watches, the open-air concerts by ardent if not expert musicians.”
Written as a comic corrective to those dynamic rags-to-riches tales, “Panic in a Suitcase” is skimpy with plot. (You can almost hear the long-suffering Nasmertovs yelling, “Plot? You want plot? Go to Los Angeles!”) In place of some carefully developing story, Akhtiorskaya delivers a series of scenes and irresistibly grotesque character studies. Esther, the Jewish matriarch of the family, is “equipped with a top-of-the-line primal-mother tool kit, with which she could produce a week’s worth of meals from iron shavings, lint, and maybe a wilted head of cabbage, use a threadbare curtain to dress her family (distant cousins included if need be), cure the common cold and any other malady non-emetic in nature (puking elicited no sympathy), and get her family out of a disaster without a scratch.”
Her daughter, Marina, works as a cleaning lady for wealthy Russian immigrants because, she notes bitterly, “Life reserved its most pungent humor for those special enough to get the joke.” Chain-smoking, angry and shocked at the slovenliness of her clients, Marina finds that she’s frequently “unable to summon the Cinderella sensation, the famous-actress delusions, the good-for-my-biopic mood.”
And there’s a whole menagerie of more bizarre side characters, described in deadpan, outrageous ways. The hostess at a party has a face “she’d borrowed from one of the nocturnal animals kept in special enclosures at the zoo,” Akhtiorskaya writes. “Women like her seem to always be squatting.” Marina’s boss has eyes “like neglected goldfish bowls, the water unchanged for months.” Another “looked as if odd parts of her needed blotting at regular intervals, as if she had to sleep wrapped in a giant paper towel, or not so giant, as she was a tiny woman with no shoulders, just minute protuberances on either side of her neck that should’ve been pushed back in.” One wonders if Akhtiorskaya hasn’t descended from some unacknowledged Russian branch of Kingsley Amis’s family.
These characters and others revolve around Pasha, the great poet of Odessa and the favorite son of the Nasmertov family. “Neglectful, self-involved, preoccupied” Pasha — who always looks “like he’d barely escaped a house fire” — is a classic literary egomaniac, and he offers Akhtiorskaya the chance to stretch out the full breadth of her satiric wit.
In the first section of the novel, he comes to Brooklyn to visit his family, a tiny hook on which Akhtiorskaya hangs several deliciously ridiculous episodes. We follow Pasha to a disastrous afternoon on the beach, where he becomes “separated from his swimming trunks.” (This wry chapter was first published two years ago in n+1). We watch Pasha mingling with old literary rivals now pretending to be successful Americans, and there’s a family vacation in which he and his father lose an oar while canoeing and remain “circling in one spot as if caught in a slow-motion tornado.”
The second half of the novel, set 15 years later, allows Akhtiorskaya to gauge the economic and cultural progress — that is, none — back in the Old Country. Pasha’s once crabby niece travels from Brooklyn to Odessa, “the land of ambiguous lung disease.” Her uncle, now the greatest poet in Ukraine, has stubbornly hung on through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the abandonment of his friends. He’s got a new wife — a servile, always naked woman who worships him, which is what every great poet deserves. But that’s not enough to protect him from “a city, a nation, a society, perhaps a whole culture in decay.” In this wry deconstruction of the myth of progress, the challenge of emigrating is no greater than the challenge of remaining behind.
Akhtiorskaya’s genius is her ability to throw off observations that sound — if they weren’t so witty — like lines from a folktale. Upon her arrival in Odessa, for instance, Pasha’s niece is offered a strange drink, “a syrup made from the fur of an old grizzly, cooked up in a cauldron on the outskirts of town by a lady who mixed cat food into everything she touched and blotted the sores of her ankles with cotton balls that got stuck under her fingernails only to fall into the caldron that had to stand on the open flame for many a day and be constantly stirred, the last ingredient being a mysterious powder responsible for the torturous effect.”
Akhtiorskaya’s genius is her ability to throw off observations that sound — if they weren’t so witty — like lines from a folktale. Upon her arrival in Odessa, for instance, Pasha’s niece is offered a strange drink, “a syrup made from the fur of an old grizzly, cooked up in a cauldron on the outskirts of town by a lady who mixed cat food into everything she touched and blotted the sores of her ankles with cotton balls that got stuck under her fingernails only to fall into the caldron that had to stand on the open flame for many a day and be constantly stirred, the last ingredient being a mysterious powder responsible for the torturous effect.” - Ron Charles

Jewish immigrants have provided a rich source of comedy — some of it dark — in American literature. Think Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Gary Shteyngart and, more recently, Anya Ulinich. Make way for a fresh female voice. Yelena Akhtiorskaya, born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1985, immigrated with her family to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn — a.k.a. Little Odessa — when she was 7. Her first novel, "Panic in a Suitcase," about a family who does the same, is a riotous, satirical take on the aspirational escape-to-a-better-life saga. Her energetic prose is too controlled to be called manic, but it's got Red Bull-strength hyper-caffeinated intensity..

When Esther and Robert Nasmertov, a pediatrician and neurologist, immigrate in 1991 with their grown daughter Marina, her husband Levik, and their 7-year-old granddaughter Frida, they leave behind their son Pasha, an antisocial, up-and-coming poet with an "allergy to life-decision discussions" who is part black sheep, part source of irritation and fascination.

My grandparents landed in Brighton Beach from Eastern Europe in the 1920s, but this is not that generation's immigration story involving pogroms, persecution, revolutions, war, Iron Curtains, and a point of no return. After the fall of the Soviet Union, borders became porous and life-changing decisions reversible.

"It was strange," Akhtiorskaya's third-person narrator comments. "There had been all this tragedy and finality, and suddenly you just had to have the money for the flight."

The novel opens in July 1993, at the start of Pasha's first reluctant visit to Brooklyn, a trip compelled by his mother's diagnosis with breast cancer, which coincides with her 65th birthday. They are noisily mobilizing for a beach outing, for which Esther packs as if they are going on a long journey — although the Atlantic Ocean is right in their front yard, just beyond the Boardwalk.

We learn a lot about this scrappy, clamorous family in the novel's first few pages, as overstuffed as its members' perpetually bursting, haphazardly packed suitcases. By age 10, "Pasha had already demonstrated a catastrophic intolerance for the idiocy of others." At 20, he converted to Russian Orthodoxy "to stave off tendencies inherited from a line of depressives."

"His conversion," Akhtiorskaya writes with surgical precision, "was bound to remain an open wound in the family flesh, susceptible to infection."

This is a book you read for its vivid characters and language more than plot, and it's hard to resist quoting from it. Panic abounds in biting cultural and visual observations, as when Pasha, debating whether to cede to his family's pressures to relocate to Brooklyn, reflects, "His fellow countrymen hadn't ventured bravely into a new land, they'd borrowed a tiny nook at the very rear of someone else's crumbling estate to make a tidy replication of the messy, imperfect original they'd gone through so many hurdles to escape, imprisoning themselves in their own lack of imagination." He notes that even the food is uncannily similar, "the only divergence being in abundance."

Akhtiorskaya's wit is mordant. Marina observes with disgust about her demoralizing first job cleaning for wealthy Hasids that their wall-to-wall carpets "were like a bib for the house, soaking up everything that never made it to the mouth." Her serially pregnant boss, she notes, has eyes "like neglected goldfish bowls, the water unchanged for months." At a poets' party on the Upper West Side, Marina "brought the glass to her mouth so often it would've been easier to keep it there." Pedestrians in sweltering Manhattan are sprayed by "air-conditioner piss" drizzling from above.

Although Akhtiorskaya has a predilection for contractions that seems at odds with the sophistication of her prose, that's a small quibble about images that expand on contact, like Lycra jeans. When the exhausted Nasmertovs sit around their living room, "Their collective sleep debt could've belonged to a class of medical students."

The second half of the novel takes place in 2008, 15 years after Pasha's first visit to America. While Frida's parents have directed all their energy toward forging ahead in their new life, their daughter, railroaded into medical school, feels the tug of what they have left behind — including her incommunicado Uncle Pasha, who has stuck out the collapse of the Soviet Union, his first marriage, and his rise and fall as Odessa's great but socially ostracized poet. Frida embarks on an Odessan odyssey that reveals a decaying city and culture that underscores a dismal reality: Neither path — emigrating or hanging tough — is rosy. (Akhtiorskaya's picture of Odessa isn't pretty, but her novel isn't about the current dire situation in Ukraine.)

To explain the malaise that sends Frida on her quest, Akhtiorskaya introduces the untranslatable concept of "zatormozhenaya," which she defines roughly as "existentially blocked" — a sort of hyper-jaded detachment. This quintessentially Russian concept from the land of such prematurely world-weary characters as Oblomov and Onegin is at the heart of this spirited, unusually promising debut about the challenges of chronic alienation and unrealistically optimistic hopes of progress. Reading Akhtiorskaya's tale of two cities is a high-impact verbal workout that may leave you breathless. - Heller McAlpin

There's a wonderful 1982 memoir called An Orphan in History by the late Village Voice writer Paul Cowan. It's about Cowan's search for his European Jewish roots, and in it he says something about the sacrifices of older generations of immigrants that's always stayed with me. Cowan says: "Millions of immigrant families . . . left the economically and culturally confining Old World towns where they were raised, and paid for the freedom and prosperity this country offered with their pasts."
Those words speak to me because that's my family's story: I can't tell you the names of my great-grandparents, left behind in Poland and Ireland, because nobody ever mentioned them. The break was that final.
These days of course, it's different. Within the space of a few hours, people can fly across oceans; through Skype and email, they can electronically commute between Old World and New. Three cheers for The March of Progress, right? Except, if you want to make a definitive break, how can you when the Old World is always calling you on the phone, texting and crashing on your living room couch for extended visits? That's the crucial question Yelena Akhtiorskaya mulls over in her sharply observed and very funny debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase.
Akhtiorskaya, who was born in Odessa and emigrated to the Russian immigrant enclave of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, at the age of seven, writes of the fictional Nasmertov family, whose move from Old World to New imitates her own. Beginning in 1993, the novel follows the lives of the Nasmertovs for over two decades as they pledge allegiance to ambivalence, most of the family members wondering, at times, about America, "Should I stay or should I go?"
The novel mostly focuses on an adult son, a poet named Pasha, who, in 1993, flies in from Odessa to visit his recently emigrated parents, sister and brother-in-law, and niece — all crammed together in noisy disharmony in a Brighton Beach walk-up. The family is pressuring Pasha to emigrate, but he's not so sure the move is worth it, especially when he sees Brighton Beach for the first time: "Filth [and] dreariness ... didn't bother him, but five [restaurants] in a row called Odessa did. His fellow countrymen hadn't ventured bravely into a new land, they'd borrowed a tiny nook at the very rear of someone else's crumbling estate to make a tidy replication of the messy, imperfect original they'd gone through so many hurdles to escape, imprisoning themselves in their own lack of imagination ..."
Pasha's feelings about emigration will continue to seesaw throughout the next decade; eventually, they'll be transferred to his niece, Frida, whose fascination with the Odessa she can barely remember pulls her back to that city.
I'm making the plot here sound contrived and it isn't. In fact, there barely is a plot in Panic in a Suitcase. That's not a criticism: what we get instead of a sweeping story are a multitude of exuberant set pieces about modern émigré life, animated by Akhtiorskaya's insider knowledge and her offbeat way with words. Here, for instance, is how she describes the view from the Nasmertov's Brighton Beach kitchen window:
The kitchen window looked out on the ocean, which had the cast-aside air of a large piece of grandparents' furniture thrown to the curb. Grandparents put plastic covers on sofas so butts and sweaty palms wouldn't damage the fabric, and children sat on the loud sticky plastic. ...The ocean seemed to be inside such a plastic cover and somewhere at the back there was a zipper that could be undone.
What an ingenious way to capture that look of the Atlantic Ocean, slick, contained, and worn out by the time it reaches Brooklyn's shores. Akhtiorskaya directs this same tart eloquence to her character studies, saying of the emotionally manipulative Pasha that: "Pasha's talent was to shift dynamics until all sympathy was directed toward him. ... He aroused feelings without necessarily returning them and was permanently enclosed in an aura of exemption."
Panic in a Suitcase updates the classic coming-to-America tale, making it more open-ended. Indeed, Akhtiorskaya's immigrants find it comically difficult to commit to a fresh start, given that so much old baggage keeps turning up on their doorstep. - Maureen Corrigan

Interview: Yelena Akhtiorskaya