The girl is eight years old when she comes off the plane at John F. Kennedy. She arrives with her parents, her older sister, and her grandparents, out of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, released by a system that has decided for its own reasons to let them leave. Members of a synagogue wait at the gate, a banner held up between them. Sana Krasikov (b. 1979) keeps two things from that morning: the press of an unfamiliar language and the force of American good will, strangers moving toward the family with a warmth the Soviet street never showed.
Her father has read the signs. For months Russian television has run documentaries on the wretchedness of American life, the homeless on the pavement, the addicts, the men who die in the open. He watches and draws the correct conclusion. “This much anti-American propaganda means they are going to let people out,” he tells the family. A state this loud in its hatred of America does not mean it. They buy the suitcases. They settle in Katonah, an hour north of the city.
She carries that morning into her work. A regime’s lies have a grammar, and the careful reader learns to decode them. Decades of her fiction turn on that single skill.
Before the airport there is Georgia. She is born in 1979 in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, to a Ukrainian mother and a Georgian father, and the family moves south to the Georgian republic while she is small. She claims little nostalgia for it. She grants that Georgians live with a Mediterranean appetite for art and pleasure, a temper apart from the Russian one, and that most people keep warm memories of childhood. She leaves it at that.
In America she moves through the institutions that sort the ambitious. She attends the Groton School, then Cornell, where she graduates in 2001 and lives at Telluride House, the residential community that selects for scholarship and a certain seriousness about public life. She is most of the way to law school when she applies, at the last moment, to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop instead. A Fulbright follows. The detour decides the rest.
Her stories appear before any book does, in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Zoetrope, and the quarterlies. “Companion” wins an O. Henry Award. The early work already holds her subject: immigrants suspended between legal systems, between economies, between the family left behind and the one not yet built.
The novel that makes her name starts with a question she asks wrong. Years into her life as a writer she sits down with an older family friend, a man she has long admired, Soviet in his bearing though born to Americans. His mother and father had joined the wave of idealists who sailed to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The purges swallowed them. He and his brother landed in orphanages. She asks him what his mother had been arrested for. He looks at her the way one looks at a slow child. “Well, she wasn’t in for anything.” To ask the question, he tells her, is to prove you do not understand Russia. She likes the moment for what it exposes. The gap in her own understanding shows her where to write.
That instinct shapes One More Year (2008), her debut collection. The linked stories follow Russian, Georgian, and Central Asian immigrants building lives in the United States while money and obligation still bind them to people overseas. She refuses the sentimental version. Her characters meet exploitative work, immigration paperwork, thin bank accounts, and marriages worn down by distance. The book wins the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, takes a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 award, and reaches the final lists for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize. Eleven languages take it up.
For the novel she goes to the source. She spends a year in Moscow, working archives that fell open after 1992, reading until she can fix an event to its month. She flies to the oil fields of Texas to learn how Americans cut deals with Russians over Arctic crude. Out of the reading and the travel she builds Florence Fein, a headstrong young woman from Brooklyn who meets a Soviet engineer through Amtorg, the trade mission, in 1933, and follows him east believing the Soviet future more just than the American present. Florence goes first to Magnitogorsk, the steel city rising in the Urals, and finds chaos, hunger, indifferent neighbors, and bedbugs. Then the trap closes. Soviet authorities take her American passport. Krasikov built that sequence to feel like suffocation, and she drew it from the record. She knows the worth of the document that lets a citizen move, having spent her childhood where it did not exist.
The Patriots (2017) reaches across eighty years and three generations, but its real subject is political faith. Krasikov wants to know how intelligent and serious people give themselves to a utopian project while the evidence of its cruelty piles up around them. She declines to make Florence a fool or a martyr. She holds the harder line: that conviction and self-deception grow from the same root, and that survival sometimes asks a person to forget. Her editor, not she, chose the title. The word turned out to be the right one, loaded on both shores.
Three days after the book reaches stores, a new administration signs an order halting entry from seven countries. Green-card holders returning home find themselves held at airports, refused translators, pressed to sign papers they cannot read that cancel their right to stay. Krasikov had lifted Florence’s confiscated passport straight from the 1930s, and here the move ran again in an American terminal. She trusts the form over the textbook. We forget the history books we read, she says, but “we do remember the novels we read.”
Her radio life feeds the fiction. In 2009 she marries Gregory Warner, an NPR correspondent, and in 2016 the two build a narrative podcast, Rough Translation, that takes a subject Americans argue about, fake news, affirmative action, surrogacy, and turns it under the light of another country. The newsroom shows up in her 2018 New Yorker story “Ways and Means,” where Oliver, an aging public-radio fixture, goes on leave over his conduct with a young podcaster, and his former lover Hal has to decide whether to speak for him under oath. Krasikov built the story after months of reading public apologies that sounded less like accounts owed to victims than acts of obedience to a movement.
She wrote much of the novel in Nairobi, where Warner reported for four years. When the family comes back to the Hudson Valley, a police officer pulls her over for speeding. She starts to cry. In Nairobi a traffic stop meant a bribe, routine and expected. Here it means a ticket and a court date, a structure she can stand inside and answer to. That reaction, she says, is her American patriot speaking. The small scene holds the whole of her subject. The immigrant who has lived where the courts do not work, and where the passport can vanish, knows what the working version costs and what it is worth.
Granta names her one of its Best Young American Novelists in 2017. France gives The Patriots its Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in 2019. She spends 2019 and 2020 as a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. Her 2022 story “The Muddle,” written after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sets two women friends against the war and lets neither win the argument, drawing on her own Ukrainian and Georgian blood. The Best American Short Stories 2023 selects it.
Two books in nearly twenty years, and a standing larger than the output. Krasikov writes by accumulation, by restraint, by a refusal to round historical people up to heroes or down to villains. Jewish identity runs through the work as memory and belonging more than observance, the position of Soviet Jews caught between a state that suspected them and a faith the state forbade. Her abiding claim is that history does not pass down clean. Each generation has to reread the files, weigh the conflicting accounts, and decide for itself what the people who came before were doing when they chose what they chose.
Sana Krasikov and the Many Patriots
A man stands at the gate of John F. Kennedy in 1987 and reads a foreign country off the faces of strangers. His daughter is eight. Behind him lies the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic and the television he watched for months, the documentaries on American squalor, the men dying on American sidewalks. He has decoded the broadcast. “This much anti-American propaganda means they are going to let people out,” he tells the family. He loves a country he has never seen well enough to gamble his children on it. He is a patriot. So is the censor in Moscow who cut the footage. So is the official who stamped the exit papers and believed, stamping them, that he served the motherland by ridding it of a people it never trusted. One word, three men, three accounts of what a life is for.
Ernest Becker gave the name for what those three men share and do not share. Each lives inside a hero system, a scheme that tells him how to earn the feeling that he counts, that his death will not erase him. The scheme assigns the sacred words. Patriot is one of them. The word carries no fixed cargo. It takes its meaning from the system that issues it, and the systems do not agree. Sana Krasikov, who came through that airport as the eight-year-old, has spent a working life writing the disagreement down.
Most writers pick a hero system and defend it. Krasikov takes the harder office. Her immortality project is the rendering of other people’s immortality projects without flattening any of them. She earns her significance by refusing the one thing every hero system demands, which is that you grant it the last word. The novel, for her, holds the incompatible faiths in one frame and lets none of them win. She has said it in the simplest terms available to a novelist: we forget the history books, and we keep the novels. The history book picks a side. The novel keeps the room full.
Consider Florence Fein, her great creation in The Patriots, a girl from Brooklyn who boards a ship in the 1930s for a country she believes will give her life weight and purpose. Florence is a patriot. Her flag is the future. She crosses an ocean to pour herself into the construction of mankind, and the steel city of Magnitogorsk takes her in with chaos, hunger, and bedbugs, and later the state takes her American passport, and later still it takes her years and her husband and her freedom, and at the end of all of it Florence still loves Russia. Krasikov refuses to call her a fool. The refusal is the moral engine of the book. A fool is a man outside a hero system looking in. Florence is a believer inside one, and from inside, her loyalty follows its own order, complete and self-justifying.
The men who break her are patriots too. This is the part most novels get wrong and Krasikov gets right. The interrogator does not think of himself as a sadist serving a lie. He thinks of himself as a patriot pruning the orchard. Krasikov learned the grammar of that conviction from an older friend whose American mother had gone to Russia in the thirties and vanished into the purges. She asked the friend what his mother had been charged with. He looked at her the way a man looks at a slow child. “Well, she wasn’t in for anything.” To ask the question, he told her, is to confess you do not understand the country. The patriot’s hero system does not require a crime. It requires only an enemy, and the system supplies the enemy, not the facts.
The word travels further than her novels. Set it down in front of a column of believers and watch it change in each set of hands.
The naturalized citizen at the oath ceremony in a county courthouse means by patriot a man who chose this ground, who reads the choosing as the proof of love, and who suspects the native-born of treating the country as furniture.
The career officer at the war college means a man who has signed his body over to the chain of command, for whom love of country runs as obedience rendered into muscle, and for whom the protester who burns the flag has mistaken the privilege for the duty.
The flag-burner means the reverse. He loves the country enough to set its symbol alight in the street, and he holds that the truest loyalty is the loyalty that corrects, and he reads the saluting officer as a child who confused the nation with the men who run it.
The Catalan in Barcelona who hangs the estelada from his balcony means a nation with no state, a homeland the maps refuse to draw, and he hears Spanish patriotism as the regime that once forbade his grandfather’s language.
The exiled monarchist in a Paris apartment, eighty years old, raises a glass each year to a throne no one sits in, and means by patriot his fidelity to a country gone since before his birth. He carries no confusion. His hero system locates the sacred object in the past, where no revolution can reach it.
The leaker who hands the state’s secrets to a reporter means that the country is its principles and not its agencies, and he takes the indictment for treason as the price of the higher allegiance, and he walks to his cell certain that he is the patriot and his prosecutors the apparatchiks.
Six men, one word. Each would sign his name under it. Each means a different god. Becker’s quarrel is no duel between two systems with a referee in the middle. It runs as a floor crowded with systems, every one of them handing out the same sacred coins stamped with different faces, every one of them promising the same thing, which is that you will not have lived for nothing.
Krasikov puts herself on that floor. Back from four years in Nairobi, in the Hudson Valley, a police officer pulls her over for speeding and she starts to cry. In Nairobi the traffic stop meant a bribe. Here it means a ticket and a date in court, a structure she can stand inside and answer to, and the tears come from the shock of a machine that works. She calls the feeling her own form of immigrant patriotism. The phrase tells you which hero system she joined. Not the flag. The working court. The piece of paper that means what it says. She is a patriot of the institutions that let a person be real before the law, because she carries in her body the memory of the institutions that made her family unreal.
Two fears drive her, and they are the two Becker named. The first is death, but death in her world wears the Soviet face, which is erasure. Not the grave. The archive scrubbed, the name unsaid, the children sent to orphanages with the family record burned behind them, the citizen made never to have been. Against that fear she writes the disappeared back onto the page. The novel is her stone over the unmarked plot.
The second fear is the one the immigrant knows in the body, the fear of belonging to no hero system at all. She has been Ukrainian, Georgian, Soviet, and American, and no single one of them owns her, and a person who owns no system has no native answer to the question of what he is for. She drew the danger through Florence, asking what would have to happen for a woman to take the word America and lock it in a drawer inside her mind. The drawer is the real terror. A self can be partitioned until the rooms forget each other. Against that fear she built an office for herself, the novelist who keeps the rooms in one house and walks between them.
The office cost her. To become the writer who grants every patriot his god, she gave up the comfort of holding one. She subtracted nostalgia first. She says she carries little of it, and a reader believes her, because nostalgia is the cheap version of loyalty, the love of a place edited down to its kindnesses. She subtracted the black-and-white frame she held as a child of immigrants, the frame that sorts the world into the wronged and the wrongdoers. She subtracted the law degree she had nearly earned and applied to a writing program at the last hour. What she renounced was membership. What she bought was the freedom to render membership from the outside, the one place from which all of it can be seen and none of it can be felt.
She tests the same lens on her own country’s new rituals. In her 2018 story “Ways and Means,” a public-radio veteran goes on leave for his conduct with a young colleague, and his confession reads less like an account owed to the woman he harmed than an act of obedience to a movement with its own sacred words and its own ledger of sins. Krasikov built it after months of reading apologies that genuflected to a cause. She grants the new hero system the scrutiny she gave the old one. The American newsroom in 2018 hands out sacred coins as fast as Moscow did in 1937, and stamps them with the language of harm and accountability, and a man inside that system earns his standing by the fluency of his contrition. She gives no sneer. She files the report.
Read her this way and three things come into focus.
Watch the loyalty she lets a character keep. She never strips a believer of his belief to win an argument. Florence loves Russia after Russia has taken everything, and Krasikov lets her, because the love is the truest fact about Florence and a lesser novelist would have confiscated it for the sake of a verdict.
Watch where she lays the scrap of paper. The passport, the exit stamp, the HR memo, the deposition, the file in the KGB warehouse. In her work the sacred and the bureaucratic share a desk. The document decides whether the system counts you as real, and the patriot of any flag learns sooner or later that his god keeps its promises in triplicate.
Watch the forgetting. She treats memory as a debt to the dead and forgetting as a mercy to the living, and she refuses to tell you which loyalty ranks higher. Her people survive by forgetting and damn themselves by it in the same breath. That refusal to settle the account is her signature, and it explains why her hero system carries no flag. A flag would settle it. She would rather keep the room full.
If John J. Mearsheimer is right in his anthropology, the fiction of Sana Krasikov becomes an exploration of tribal gravitation and the failure of individualistic migration. Her debut short story collection, One More Year, and her novel, The Patriots, focus on characters who move across continents, attempting to escape their native societies or construct completely new identities in foreign lands.
A standard liberal interpretation of these narratives views immigration as the ultimate exercise of individual autonomy. In that view, a character like Florence Fein in The Patriots uses independent reason to reject the confining expectations of her Brooklyn family during the Great Depression, choosing to build a life in Soviet Moscow based on personal conviction. The characters in One More Year similarly look like atomistic actors navigating the choice to build fresh lives in the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mearsheimer’s logic challenges this individualistic reading. He argues that humans are profoundly social beings from start to finish, and that their thinking about right and wrong comes from early socialization and inborn attitudes. For Krasikov’s characters, the initial impulse to migrate is not a product of detached, abstract reasoning. It is a reaction to the pressures, failures, or heavy value infusions of the primary group. Florence Fein does not step into a vacuum of pure independence; she leaves one collective structure only to entangle herself in another—the totalizing social and political group of Stalinist Russia.
Furthermore, The Patriots tracks one family across three generations moving between America and Russia. This multigenerational scope matches Mearsheimer’s observation that the long human childhood exposes individuals to an intense value infusion before their critical faculties develop. The children and grandchildren do not start with a clean slate; they inherit the identity, historical baggage, and tribal attachments of the family line, regardless of which continent they inhabit. What looks like an independent economic pursuit, such as navigating a transcontinental oil deal in modern Russia, is constrained by the lingering logic of past family decisions.
In One More Year, the struggle of immigrants from Russia and Georgia is the struggle of deeply social beings torn from their primary tribes. Mearsheimer notes that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and cooperate with fellow members. Krasikov’s characters face disorientation not because they lack individual capability, but because the foundational social structures that gave them identity have collapsed or been left behind.
If Mearsheimer is right, Krasikov’s work demonstrates that human beings cannot simply reinvent themselves through personal choice. The primary group imprints itself permanently, and the individual remains bound to the collective realities of his origin.
If David Pinsof is right, the fiction of Sana Krasikov (b. 1979) exposes the flaw in the mainstream intellectual view of migration and history. Her stories in One More Year and her novel The Patriots trace the friction of people moving between societies, across borders, and through decades of political change. Mainstream critics often read her work as an exploration of the tragic misunderstandings, cultural displacements, and communication breakdowns that haunt immigrants and idealists.
A Pinsofian analysis strips away this framework. The characters in her debut collection, One More Year, are not suffering from a cognitive failure or a simple inability to adapt to American life. They are rational actors navigating a cold assessment of incentives. Her characters make difficult choices about relationships and resources because they are engaged in a sharp competition for security and status in a foreign environment. Their actions reflect calculated attempts to secure resources and minimize losses in a world where survival requires clear-eyed strategy.
This logic becomes even clearer in her novel, The Patriots. The book follows an American idealist, Florence Fein, who moves to the Soviet Union during the Great Depression, only to find herself trapped in the machinery of Stalin’s purges. A conventional writer might treat this as a tragedy born of ideological misinformation or a deep historical misunderstanding. But if Pinsof is correct, the conflict is not a mistake. Totalitarian regimes do not operate on a misunderstanding; state actors use the coercive apparatus of the state to crush rivals, protect alliances, and retain absolute control. The characters who betray one another are not confused. They understand their incentives perfectly when the stakes mean life or death.
By writing these intricate narratives, Krasikov provides a high-status mission statement for elite readers who prize historical awareness and empathy. Her work functions as an instrument within the literary marketplace to secure reputation and prestige. It allows the writer and her audience to look down upon the harsh operations of the past while claiming a position of moral superiority in the cultural hierarchy. Her insights are not tools to correct human error, but maps of the competitive logic that drives human behavior across generations.
You Don’t Understand Russia: Sana Krasikov and the Tacit Competence of Survival
A woman sits across from an older man she has admired for years and asks him a question. His mother was an American who sailed to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and disappeared into the purges. He and his brother grew up in orphanages. What, she asks, was his mother arrested for. He gives her the look you give someone who has missed the obvious. “Well, she wasn’t in for anything.” To ask the question, he tells her, is to confess you do not understand Russia.
Sana Krasikov has built a body of work on the contents of that sentence. The friend is telling her that something stands between her and his mother’s life, something he holds and she lacks, and that he cannot hand it across the table. He could recite every fact of the case and she would still ask the wrong question. What he knows about how arrests worked does not live in propositions. It lives below them, in a reflex, and the reflex took years inside the system to form.
Stephen P. Turner has spent his career taking that reflex seriously and refusing the easy account of it. The easy account says a society holds a shared tacit understanding, an inside, that its members carry and outsiders miss. Turner’s The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions (1994) attacks that picture at the root. If a society shares a tacit thing, the thing has to pass from one person to the next, reproduced, in Bourdieu’s word, in each new member. Turner finds no plausible route for the passage. Strip away the shared sameness and what remains is no collective possession at all. It is habit, acquired one person at a time. There is no Russia to be understood as an object the friend keeps in his pocket. There are millions of people who each lived under the same conditions and each formed, on his own, expectations close enough that an observer files them under one word.
This is the sleeper that runs under all of Krasikov’s fiction. She writes as though she agrees with Turner without ever having to cite him.
Watch how she works and the agreement shows. A writer who believed Russianness were a substance she could absorb would steep in it and trust the steeping. Krasikov does the opposite. She rebuilds the reflex the way the natives built it, out of particulars, one at a time. She spends a year in Moscow in archives that opened after 1992. She travels to Magnitogorsk, the steel city in the Urals, to stand where her character stands. She reads until she can date an event to the month. None of that buys her a collective understanding, because there is none to buy. What it buys her is the long exposure that produces the trained anticipation, the same exposure her characters paid for with their lives. She logs the hours.
Her subject is the gap between what a system says and what its survivors know. The saying is explicit. It is the Party line, the textbook, the broadcast, and it can be written down and shipped anywhere. The knowing is tacit. It is the reflex that reads the saying right, and it cannot be shipped at all.
Her father stands at the gate of John F. Kennedy in 1987 and gives the clearest example in her record. For months Soviet television has run films on the misery of American life, the homeless, the addicts, the dying in the street. He watches and draws the operational meaning, the inverse of the text. “This much anti-American propaganda means they are going to let people out,” he tells the family. No sentence in the broadcast says so. The broadcast says America is hell. He hears, under it, that the state protests too much, and that the protest signals an opening. He did not learn that reading from a manual. He calibrated it over a lifetime against outcomes, who left, who stayed, what followed what, and the calibration is his alone even though every survivor around him ran a version of the same sum.
Krasikov returns to the gap whenever she can reach it. Her Russian-born journalists read American news and put a Soviet spin on it, and they trust the foreign source over the domestic one, and they stay loyal to the country all the same, untroubled that the thing they read is false at the literal level, because they grasp that it serves a larger truth that level cannot reach. That is tacit competence at its purest, the skill of sorting which register a statement lives in. The doctrine is the same for everyone. The competence to operate it belongs to each man one at a time.
Krasikov never lets the tacit harden into a shared essence. Julian, the Russian-born son of two American Jews in The Patriots, gives her the test case. Is he a Soviet Jew or an American one. The novel will not answer, because the answer presumes a type, a collective substance he either has or does not, and she does not believe in the substance. She gives you instead a particular man with a particular history and a set of habits no other character duplicates. She writes the resemblances among her Russians and she writes the divergences, and she never reaches behind them for the thing they are all assumed to carry. There is no thing. There is the family record and the calibrated reflex, and those are individual all the way down.
The same holds for her craft. She built the sequence where Soviet authorities confiscate her character’s American passport to feel like suffocation, and readers report the suffocation, and she could not give you the rule by which she produced it. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop teaches an explicit doctrine, that the author’s identity has no bearing on the prose. Her competence sits below that doctrine, in the trained hand, unstatable. And the question of how a reader comes to understand Russia by reading her has the same answer. The reader acquires no transmitted substance. The novel reproduces the reflex in him, scene by scene, until his own anticipations begin to run the way a Soviet citizen’s ran. The book manufactures, in compressed form, the exposure that time gave the native. It is the one instrument that can do for an outsider what years did for the insider.
In her 2018 story “Ways and Means,” a public-radio veteran goes on leave for his conduct with a young colleague, and his apology reads to the woman who knew him as obedience to a movement more than account to a victim. Krasikov sees the new American rite by its function because she did not grow up inside it. The native cannot see the rite he was raised inside. The immigrant, who acquired her reflexes against a different system, reads the contrition as a learned performance, fluent and tactical, the way a foreigner notices an accent the locals cannot hear in themselves. Her outsider’s distance is no handicap here. It is the instrument.
Read her this way and three things come forward.
Watch what her people can do and cannot say. The competence shows in performance and goes silent under questioning. The friend who knows his mother was in for nothing cannot teach that knowledge. He can only show that you lack it.
Watch how she builds understanding in the reader. She gives particulars and withholds the lecture. She trusts accumulation over exposition, because she is not transmitting a thing, she is retraining a reflex, and a reflex forms only under repetition.
Watch where she refuses the collective noun. Russia, the Jew, the immigrant, the American. She will not let any of them name a shared substance. She names a man and his history and the habits the history left in him. The friend was right that she did not understand Russia. He was wrong about why. There was nothing in him to hand her. There were only the hours, and her work is the long labor of putting in the hours on the page, for herself and for everyone who reads her.
Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma
Back from four years in Nairobi, in the Hudson Valley, a police officer pulls Sana Krasikov over for speeding, and she starts to cry. In Nairobi the traffic stop meant a bribe, the transaction everyone understood. Here it means a ticket and a date in court, a place she can stand inside and answer for herself. The tears come from the shock of a machine that works. She calls the feeling her own immigrant patriotism.
Jeffrey Alexander has a name for the thing she crossed into. The civil sphere runs on a binary code. On the sacred side stand the democratic motives and relations and institutions: the reasonable citizen, the truthful exchange, the rule of law, the impersonal office that holds whoever sits in it to the same standard. On the profane side stand their opposites: the secret deal, the personal loyalty that overrides the rule, the arbitrary power, the faction. A working civil sphere sorts actors onto these poles through public ritual, purifying the ones who serve the sacred values and polluting the ones who betray them. Krasikov’s patriotism is faith in the code. She believes in the sacred pole because she has lived where it was a fiction.
She knows the code can run without the sphere. In The Patriots, Florence Fein loses her American passport to a clerk and falls into the hands of Captain Subotin of the secret police, who calls her in across five years and demands the names of enemies. The Soviet state speaks the language of purity and pollution with more fluency than any democracy. It has its sacred people and its profane enemy of the people, its traitors and wreckers and rootless cosmopolitans, its rituals of denunciation and confession. What it lacks is the autonomous civil sphere that makes the sorting answerable to anyone outside the center. The pollution comes down from above, by force, attached to whoever the state needs to destroy. Krasikov shows the form of moral classification stripped of the thing that gives it conscience. At the murdered actor Solomon Mikhoels’s state funeral she lays his battered face under greasepaint as if for one last role, a purification rite staged by the same power that killed him. The show trial, the Doctors’ Plot, the Night of the Murdered Poets: these are purification rituals with the civil sphere torn out, pollution as a tool of the arbitrary center.
Alexander’s larger argument concerns how a society comes to feel a wound as its own. A trauma is not the event. It is the work a society does to turn an event into a shared story, and the work falls to carrier groups who hold the resources and the standing and the skill to make the claim land. They must answer four questions to build the master narrative. What was the pain. Who was the victim. What does the victim have to do with the rest of us. Who caused it. Krasikov is a carrier group of one. The Patriots is her bid to take the suffering of the trapped American expatriates and the Soviet Jews and brand it onto an American audience that has forgotten it ever happened. Her son Julian names the pain and the perpetrator in a single line, that the trapped Americans were sacrificed on the common altar of two superpowers. The victim is not some foreign other. The victim is American, your people, your countrymen abandoned by their own government. The novel is her chosen arena, the aesthetic one, the same arena that turned a girl’s diary into the first shared image of the Holocaust.
She is fighting the outcome Alexander calls the great paradox. The gulag, like the rape of Nanking, killed its millions and never marked the world the way the Nazi murder of the Jews did. The suffering was real. The trauma process failed. No carrier group with enough reach built the narrative and made the wider world take it on board. Krasikov knows this in her bones. She has said we forget the history books and keep the novels. The novel is her instrument for finishing the trauma process the textbooks could not.
She does one thing that sets her apart and puts her at risk inside the model. Alexander warns that the audience will widen the circle of the we only if the victim is drawn in qualities the audience already holds sacred. The trauma narrative wants a pure victim. Krasikov refuses to supply one. Under Subotin’s pressure Florence informs on friends. She is a victim and a collaborator in the same body. She loved the regime that destroyed her and stayed loyal after it took her husband and her freedom. A safer carrier group would purify her, would sand off the collaboration and the love so the reader could mourn without complication. Krasikov leaves the stain on. She is after a harder solidarity than the easy grief over a spotless martyr. She asks whether you can take on board the suffering of the one who also gave names, who also believed. That is the steeper climb, and the civil sphere she trusts is built for the spotless victim, not this one.
She turns the same eye on her own country’s purifications. In her story “Ways and Means,” Oliver, an aging public-radio man, goes on leave for his conduct with a young colleague, and his apology reads to the woman who knew him as a rite owed to a movement more than an account owed to the person he harmed. Alexander watched the Watergate hearings grant this absolution. The witnesses who confessed received forgiveness from the committee’s priests through well-worn ritual forms, their conversions staged for the watching nation. He watched the administration men bring their wives and children to the table, lining up family behind them to signal the personal loyalty of the profane pole, while the senators kept their own families invisible and spoke for the impersonal law. Krasikov reads the studio apology the way Alexander reads the hearing, as a purification ritual with a coded script. She can see the script because she has seen the Soviet one. The thing she will not look away from is the resemblance. The civil sphere’s binary can renew a democracy, as it did when it drove a president from office, and it can run as a machine that pollutes on command, as it did in Moscow. The studio confession sits somewhere between, a cleansing rite whose sincerity she leaves an open question.
Read her through this frame and three things hold steady.
Watch where she sets the scrap of paper and the working office. The bribe against the ticket, the personal favor against the impersonal rule, the clerk who steals a passport against the court she can stand inside. Her deepest loyalty runs to the sacred institutions that hold an office above the man who fills it, because she has counted the cost of their absence.
Watch the victim she refuses to purify. She does the full labor of building a shared wound and then declines to hand the audience the pure sufferer the work seems to need. She wants the recognition that survives the discovery that the victim also collaborated, also believed. The cheap solidarity she leaves to others.
Watch the ritual form across regimes. She reads the show trial, the Senate hearing, and the studio apology with one steady eye, and she will not pretend the family resemblance away. The binary code of the civil sphere is the finest thing men have built for living together and a thing that has run on innocent blood, and she has stood on both sides of it. She cried at the traffic stop because she knows what the working version costs and what the broken version costs more.
Sana Krasikov’s Social Set
Sana Krasikov belongs to the narrow apex of American literary fiction, the few hundred writers, editors, and judges who decide each year which new books count as serious. The set has concentric rings. At the center sits a cohort of Soviet-born Jewish writers who came to America as children and write in English about the world they left: Gary Shteyngart (b. 1972), Lara Vapnyar, Boris Fishman, Anya Ulinich, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Irina Reyn, Olga Grushin, Ellen Litman, and the scholar and memoirist Maxim D. Shrayer. David Bezmozgis works the same material from Toronto. Keith Gessen, who runs in adjacent circles, came out of the same emigration. These are her literary family. They share a subject, a double ear for Russian and American registers, and a suspicion of the country that produced them and the country that took them in.
Around that center runs her generation of prestige novelists. In 2017 Granta placed her on its once-a-decade list of the best young American novelists, the issue that anoints the writers a London jury expects to last. The company tells you the room she stands in: Jesse Ball, Halle Butler, Emma Cline, Joshua Cohen (b. 1980), Mark Doten, Jen George, Rachel B. Glaser, Lauren Groff, Yaa Gyasi, Garth Risk Hallberg, Greg Jackson, Catherine Lacey, Ben Lerner, Karan Mahajan, Anthony Marra (b. 1984), Dinaw Mengestu, Ottessa Moshfegh, Chinelo Okparanta, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Claire Vaye Watkins. Marra writes Russia and Chechnya and shares her ground. Cohen writes the Jewish past and shares her other ground. The earlier Granta lists carried the names that now sit a tier above hers in reputation: Jonathan Safran Foer (b. 1977), Nicole Krauss (b. 1974), Jeffrey Eugenides, Yiyun Li, Karen Russell.
The institutions form the third ring, and they hold the keys. Krasikov published her early stories in The New Yorker, where Deborah Treisman and Cressida Leyshon decide which fiction reaches the largest serious audience in the country. Her books came from Spiegel & Grau, where Cindy Spiegel edited her. Granta in London, under Sigrid Rausing, gave her the list and a UK home. The Jewish Book Council, through its Sami Rohr Prize and its journal Paper Brigade, claims her for Jewish letters. The National Book Foundation named her to its 5 Under 35. The New York Public Library kept her two years as a Cullman fellow. Behind all of it stands the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she trained, and Cornell before it, and the Telluride House that selects for a certain seriousness. The set credentials itself through these names. To say “Iowa, the New Yorker, Granta, a Cullman year” is to give a writer’s rank without giving a number.
One more ring sits to the side, the public-radio world she entered through her husband, Gregory Warner, the NPR correspondent she married in 2009 and built the podcast Rough Translation with. That world prizes the same things in a lower key: the well-reported story, the foreign angle, the voice that explains one culture to another. Her story “Ways and Means” runs on its rituals.
What the set values comes through in its praise words. Craft. Range. Intelligence on the page. The earned sentence. The book that does the research and carries its weight. It honors complexity above all and treats ambiguity as a sign of grace. One of her Granta cohort put the creed in one line, that even in invention the writer’s task is to tell the truth, and the set nods at that without thinking it needs defense. The novel is the prestige object. The short story is the apprenticeship and the maintenance dose, the thing you place in a magazine to stay visible between books. The foreign, the translated, the cosmopolitan all carry weight, and provincialism reads as a defect. Sentiment is the enemy. To call a book sentimental in this set is to end the conversation about it.
A life well spent, in their eyes, ends with books that outlast the news. The model arc is clear and everyone in the set can recite it. You publish stories in the right magazines. Your debut wins a prize or makes a list. You follow it with an ambitious novel that critics call necessary. You collect the fellowships that buy you time. You get translated into a dozen languages and taught in a few seminars. Then, if the work holds, the people who decide such things begin to call you permanent. Money is welcome and rarely the goal. Fame of the loud kind reads as vulgar. The prize they are playing for is the verdict of the right judges that the work will keep being read. Krasikov said the thing the set believes most, that we forget the history books and we keep the novels. To make the thing that gets kept is the whole ambition.
The status games run under a collegial surface. Rank comes from where you publish, and The New Yorker sits at the top of the masthead in every writer’s mind. Rank comes from prizes, the Pulitzer and the National Book Award at the summit, then the Whiting, the PEN/Hemingway, the Sami Rohr, the 5 Under 35, each worth a known number of points. Rank comes from fellowships, a Cullman or a Guggenheim, and from the once-a-decade Granta list that resets the generational order. It comes from your publisher and your editor and your agent, from the names who blurb you, from who reviews you and where, from the count of languages on your rights page. Krasikov’s eleven translations are a credential she carries without having to mention them. The move from stories to the novel is the great ascent, and the set watches to see whether a story writer can carry the longer form. Praise creates its own danger here. The set frets about the young writer flooded with acclaim too early, the debut that draws more love than the work can bear, and a reviewer said as much about Krasikov, wondering whether the early praise would help or hurt her. Output becomes a quiet measure too. Two books in nearly twenty years reads, in this set, as either rigor or trouble, and the members keep a discreet tally.
The set holds firm rules about what a writer owes. You owe the truth, even inside invention. You owe your material honest research, and you have no right to a history you have not earned. You owe the people you write about a rendering that refuses to flatten them. You owe the reader complexity and deny him the easy verdict. You stay suspicious of flags and of any story that sorts the world into the innocent and the guilty. You behave well toward other writers, blurb generously, and serve on the panels, because the set rewards the good literary citizen and remembers the bad one. Above these sits the first commandment, that you never preach. The soapbox is the cardinal offense. When Krasikov’s Ways and Means” appeared, a reader’s first worry was whether the story had been built to let the author stand on a cause, and the worry shows the rule. A thesis kills a story. The set agrees on this the way a church agrees on its creed.
The set preaches against essences and lives by several. Its stated faith holds that no identity is fixed, that the writer’s task is to show men turning each other into strangers, that types are a failure of attention. Yet the same set treats literary talent as a real and recognizable thing, a gift the judges can spot and rank, and builds its whole order on the belief that some sensibilities are finer than others by nature. It treats the immigrant writer as a position carrying its own authority, as though displacement granted a sight the native lacks. It runs a prize for Jewish literature that presumes Jewishness names a literary essence a book can hold. It speaks of an author’s voice as something innate, hers and no one else’s. Krasikov’s own standing in the set comes in part from how hard she resists the cruder version of this, her refusal to let Russian or Jewish or American harden into a type, which the set reads as sophistication and rewards with respect. She profits, in other words, from declining the essence the set keeps.
The grammar by which they sort the admirable from the contemptible followst. The sins are sentimentality, didacticism, propaganda, cliché, and ambition worn on the sleeve. The virtues are honesty, restraint, range, the earned line, and generosity to one’s peers. Cruelty is permitted, even admired, when the prose earns it, because honesty outranks comfort and a true hard sentence beats a kind false one. Ambition is required but must hide inside craft, since the writer who shows hunger is suspect and the writer who shows only the work is pure. The lowest thing a writer can be in this set is a propagandist with a message. The highest is the one who sets the thing down entire and trusts the reader to judge it. Krasikov sits near the top of that grammar. She does the research, refuses the sermon, declines the binary, and renders the believer and the jailer with the same care. The set built its values to honor that, and so it honors her.
The Voice
Her signature move is inversion, and it runs from the architecture down to the sentence. The Patriots opens on a Brooklyn woman boarding a ship out of New York in 1934, watching European immigrants trudge back toward their homelands, and she sees an Ellis Island newsreel flipped into reverse, Lady Liberty waving the masses goodbye. The American myth of ingathering, run backward. The book is an immigrant novel, except the immigrant leaves. Krasikov builds the irony into the frame before a character speaks.
She narrates by shifting register. The 1930s strand runs in a close third that lives inside Florence’s idealism without endorsing it, free indirect style that lets you feel the faith and watch it curdle. The present-day strand hands the microphone to her son Julian, whose first-person account turns sardonic and jaundiced, a man taking jaundiced looks back at his mother across the far side of the catastrophe. One reviewer called the result a kaleidoscopic third braided with the first person, melodrama set against satire, scrupulous detail against sweeping panorama. The voice changes by era. Sincerity in 1934, a comedy of corruption in 2008, the kleptocratic Moscow chapters played near farce.
At the sentence she works toward the flat maxim that lands at the end of a paragraph. Florence “fled the Land of the Free to feel free.” Her creed runs that “Breaking your family’s heart was the price you paid for rescuing your own.” A late turn arrives at a revelation that “the secret to living was simply forgetting.” A character sizes up the age: “we’re all leashed pretty tightly to the era we’re living through.” These are her tuning fork. She sets the hard-won line down without flourish and lets it sit. The restraint is the rhetoric. She keeps her voice low so the line carries.
Her diction sits on a spare base and spends its precision on the telling object. A Soviet functionary arches a “groomed” eyebrow, and a class appears in one word. Critics credit her research with an exemplary thoroughness, the parts of a jet fighter, a Stalin rally, a Thai sex parlor, all of it carried into texture rather than lectured. In the contemporary strand the idiom turns current and comic, the grandson Lenny styling himself “a cowboy on the frontiers of private enterprise.” She can date a Soviet event to the month, and the discipline shows as confidence, not display, though a sharp reader caught her giving 1959 the wrong hair product.
Her tone holds a controlled surface over violent material, what the jacket of One More Year called quietly explosive prose. The rage is banked, and it surfaces in set pieces. At the murdered actor Solomon Mikhoels’s (1890–1948) state funeral she lays his mutilated face under greasepaint “as if for one last role,” and a lone fiddler plays a dirge for his Tevye into the dark. The Forward judged her strongest when she is enraged, and the judgment holds. She tends to withhold the verdict and work by indirection. She has described the task as feeling around the contours of inescapability, the boundary of its negative space.
Her manner is the patient witness who distrusts every ideology on offer and declines to hand you a verdict. She renders the believer and the jailer with the same attention and lets neither off and damns neither. Critics set her among the Russian chroniclers of the century, Grossman, the Mandelstams, Shalamov, Akhmatova, Solzhenitsyn, and among the American panoramic family novel, Franzen’s The Corrections, Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Lahiri’s The Namesake. The two lineages name her register: the moral weight of the Russian tradition poured into the multi-generational story the American workshop favors.
The verdict on her sentences divides, and truth asks me to say so. One camp finds a line of truth and shining detail on every page. The other finds the prose veering from lyrical to clunky, the early plot slack, Florence’s innocence hard to credit, and one trade review called the prose awkward. The unevenness is the cost of the scale. A novel that moves across eighty years and a dozen viewpoints pays for it where the registers meet, and her voice is surer in the close psychological scene than in the machinery that carries you between them.
What the voice is for: she builds irony into the structure so you cannot rest inside one country’s story, she keeps the surface flat so the buried violence lands harder, and she works the negative space so you supply the feeling she withholds. The irony is moral equipment, not decoration. She wants you to do the judging she refuses to do for you.
Russian Emigre Author Sana Krasikov (2-23-2008)
During LimmudLA, I become fascinated with the plight of Soviet Jewry.
My new cause is fueled by one Soviet Jew in particular — author Sana Krasikov (the Forward, the Atlantic, the New Yorker). She has a book of short stories coming out ("One More Year") and she’s easy on the eyes.
After confessing my amazement that I had just attended a presentation (video) on the first Soviet-Jewish generation, a Russian bloke confides in me that his interest too was not purely intellectual.
Sunday night, for her last presentation on some fancy pants bit of literature, Sana persuades her four attendees to give her high-brow efforts the big skip and join her at Clive Lawton’s lecture on Jacob (amazing stuff!).
My Sana Krasikov Interview (4-25-2008)
I talked to her for two hours by phone Thursday morning. It got bumpy.
My legendary charm was nowhere to be found.
YourMoralLeader: Emma, just tell your parents you have to go to LA to fundraise for the IRA
Emma: lol
Emma: I love your wit
YourMoralLeader: tell em you regret you only have one life to give for your country
Emma: I will tell them with crocodile tears
guest11: Who is Luke talking to?
guest11: Soviet immigrants…..
guest11: Commies
YourMoralLeader: sana krasikov
YourMoralLeader: google her
guest11: She looks hot, in that descended-from-Mongol-invaders sort of way
guest11: So many Russians have that look.
YourMoralLeader: yes
YourMoralLeader: product of rape
YourMoralLeader: so sad and yet so hot
guest11: "Scratch a Russian, find a Mongol"
guest11: But the maternal lines were preserved
YourMoralLeader: yes
guest11: And such women are good at riding ponies.
guest11: They know their way around the steppe
guest11: The next time you interview her, ask her how she is around ponies and in hauling things on sleds.
guest11: I’ll bet she rules on both
I met Sana at LimmudLA.
We hit it off.
I just read her first book and wanted to discuss it with her.
I call her at 7 a.m. April 24, 2008, with evil on my mind.
Sana: "You’re up so early. It must get light at 4 a.m. in LA."
Luke: "About 6:15 a.m."
Sana: "Do you have a morning ritual? Do you get up and go for a jog in the mountains?"
Luke: "I get up and put on tefillin and then check my email."
"My apartment is the size of where you’d park a car."
Sana: "By New York standards, that’s luxury."
Luke: "It’s really small. Women freak out."
Sana: "That was my first trip to LA. I had a friend give me a tour of Beverly Hills after LimmudLA was over. I feel like I should’ve been more overwhelmed. He said it was all movie stars and Persian Jews."
"We drove down Rodeo Drive. We drove up and down these hills. It was a little bit like being in an Orientalist painting. All these perspectives."
We talk about her work history.
Sana: "After college, I worked for a few months in New Hampshire as a reporter at a small newspaper. Then I went to New York for a year and worked in a law firm. I decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I went to the Iowa Writers Workshop for two years. Then I got a Fullbright and studied in Moscow for a year. Now I’m back in New York."
Sana spent her first years in Georgia and Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union). "We came to the States when I was almost nine."
Her parents are engineers.
Luke: "What are your memories of living under communism?"
Sana: "Phrased that way, I don’t think I had that kind of macro perpective on it. Georgia was a bit different. It was marginal in the best way. It was very ethnically diverse. There was a more casual attitude about Soviet power there. It was a little bit like New York in terms of how international Georgia was. It is a junction between East and West."
Luke: "What kind of Jewish identity were you raised with?"
Sana: "We were your typically non-practicing Soviet Jews. When I went to the Ukraine for the summers, I do remember a synagogue next to where my grandfather lived. That’s the only time I remember seeing Jews practice. I’m an Ashkenazi Jew from Georgia. I know that Georgian Jews have more of a religious identity than Ashkenazi Jews. I don’t think we went to synagogue until we came to the United States."
Luke: "Was it a regular thing?"
Sana: "My family goes on the holidays. As I got older, I’d go to Shabbat dinners."
Luke: "What role does Judaism play in your life today?"
Sana: "Let me think about that for a sec."
There’s a ten second pause.
Sana: "My interest in it deepens every year. When I was in Moscow, I started studying Torah once a week. Being a brainy person and enjoying the intellectual rigor of it, that was something I took to. I do to some degree keep kosher.
"Coming from a Soviet background where so much of the identity is being a group that hasn’t been treated well, that’s an identity I don’t relate to well. Like any old and deep tradition, there’s so much more to it than that. To approach it the way a lot of Russian immigrants do, I find kind of unpalatable. That we’re Jews because we were oppressed."
"That’s not to say I’m not a spiritual person. I do feel it at a level that’s not just intellectual.
"I don’t know if that answers your question."
Luke: "How did you experience LimmudLA?"
Sana: "As a presenter, a portion of my mind was always about the next thing I had to present. I experienced the LA part of LimmudLA. Women in kipas was not something I’d seen before. When you ask somebody their affiliation and they say, ‘I’m post-denominational.’ It was very hip. It made me want to move to LA. It seemed like a fun place."
Luke: "When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?"
Sana: "For a while, I wanted to be a dentist. Everything in town was falling apart, but we had this amazing dental clinic. I did visual arts for many years — painting, woodcuts, etching, lithography, ink paintings. I never envisioned writing."
Luke: "When did you realize you were a writer?"
Sana: "You are what you do. When I write, I’m a writer. When I don’t, I’m not. When I went to Cornell (I started off in Chemistry and then did a joint American History/Literature major), I couldn’t take any art classes. I was depressed about it. As a creative person, you need a creative outlet. In my junior year, I didn’t take writing seriously, but it was a way to sublimate my desire to express myself. It was a lot of pent-up creative energy getting expressed."
Luke: "If you were to read a book, with how much accuracy could you guess whether the author was male or female?"
Sana: "That is a great, great question. I think I could guess with high accuracy. Men and women use language differently. Men think more verbally and women think more adjectivally. For women, our brains are databases of preferences. We can go into a room and without a lot of verbal communication, we can know what everybody wants in that room. You can see that male writers have a different approach to sentences and they do use stronger verbs."
Luke: "What have your parents most wanted from you?"
Sana: "To be happy. They both work a lot. They’re pretty busy with their own lives."
"Parents want you to be passionate about something boring but they realized after a while it wasn’t going to work with me."
Sana has an older sister.
Krasikov says she enjoyed her few months as a reporter "in a really sadistic way. Writing fiction you’re on your own a lot. When you’re a reporter, you see people every day. You’re like a tourist in different worlds. You have to churn stuff out. You can’t think about craft."
Luke: "Where were you a reporter?"
Sana: "I’m not telling you."
Luke: "Why are MFAs so popular among novelists?"
Sana: "It gives people socially sanctioned time to write. They don’t have to justify why they’re dropping out of life for two years."
Luke: "What effect does it have on writing that all these writers have MFAs?"
Sana: "I was told that my writing was not MFA writing."
"People focus a lot on language and that’s a double-edged sword. It’s wonderful to explore language in novel ways but there’s much more to writing than that. I too want to push my writing but only to the degree that I can still tell a good story and say something about human beings and the social world. I don’t think you can teach that.
"Writing has become very much about sentence writing. That’s not the most interesting thing about fiction to me."
Luke: "Is writing a lonely profession?"
Sana: "It’s a solitary profession. Even as a kid, I never felt lonely. I enjoy solitude. After being social, I need to withdraw into my own space."
Luke: "Has anybody in your life complained that you used them for your writing?"
Sana: "No."
Luke: "Is there a genre of Jewish-American-Russian fiction and do you belong in this? Your work reminds me of Gary Shteyngart, only not as absurd."
Sana: "Really? I don’t think so."
Luke: "OK. Here is where I given an opinion to invite your feedback."
Sana: "Go ahead."
Luke: "It seems with all the other post-Communist Jewish writers who come to America, this is just a feeling I have, together with your book, it seems like all the characters are Godless and as a consequence they’re hopeless. And the result is depression [for me]."
Sana’s shocked. "By godless, do you mean they don’t believe in God?"
Luke: "They may believe in God, but he doesn’t have a role in their life. I’m thinking it comes from growing up in atheistic communism. Therefore, there’s a hopelessness. I always get depressed when I read this genre."
Sana: "I’m not sure it’s a genre, but can you give me an example of writing where the characters are not godless?"
Luke: "Say, Dostoevsky, where some of the characters are God-intoxicated. Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full. You know what it is to deal with someone where God is a vital part of their life?"
Sana: "Hmm."
Luke: "In Gary Shteyngart’s books and in other post-Communist American-Jewish literature I’ve read, all the characters lead pointless lives."
Sana: "Do you think there may be an element of projection in this?"
Luke: "Maybe. I’m throwing this out there."
Sana: "You’re dealing with some issues and you see them around you.
"I do find that writing fiction is a Rorschach’s test for people. They see what they want to see. Maybe you’re struggling with these issues yourself now and in a strange way it’s flattering for me to hear this because it means you are seeing my characters as people who you can pass judgment on, which is fine by me.
"I think God is in every life. God has a way of making his existence manifest. Some people are more conscious of God’s existence in their day-to-day life."
"I would venture to disagree with you about my characters. Some of them do grapple with God. I do write about the kind of people I encounter. They do come from a world where spirituality has not been at the top of their list of priorities. I’m a pretty spiritual person and I see God’s existence in a lot of different ways. I don’t think it’s always clear. It’s arrogant to think we know God’s plan for us. Something that prosaic in our lives may lead us to a place of spiritual growth."
"I would have to read my stories over and look at it through that lens. They are certainly characters who live a different life from you but I’d like to think that if they were real people, God would try to help them out."
Luke: "I feel like all these characters are products of this 70-year atheistic experiment in communism."
Sana: "What are you thinking of in particular?"
Luke: "For 70 years in the Soviet Union, there was no religiously directed character building, no sense of the transcendent, and these people all leave me depressed."
Sana: "Maybe you’re just depressed, Luke? What’s going on in your life?"
Luke: "Maybe."
Sana: "Did you go outside yesterday?"
Luke: "I go outside every day."
Sana: "Good, good."
Luke: "You don’t find your characters depressing?"
Sana: "I don’t. They just feel like regular people leading regular lives. They’re people stuck between a rock and a hard place. They’re struggling. We feel God’s presence when we struggle. I don’t have an interest in writing about characters who aren’t struggling. If everything was going great in their lives, why would I want to write about them? I’m not sure that in the 70 years of socialism, people were completely Godless. Spirituality has always been pretty important in Russia. People just sublimate it in different ways. Russians have always worshiped literature. They often say that’s their spirituality. People did still secretly go to church. We always had matzo on Passover. People always held on to their traditions there. From a western standpoint, yes, the dogma was Godless, but if you look at people’s day-to-day lives, they weren’t as Godless as you’d think."
Luke: "Are any of your characters triumphant?"
Sana: "That’s a very male question. Interesting. Do they triumph over adversity? Is that your question?"
Luke: "Just, are they triumphant? I’ll just leave it there."
Sana: "What do you mean by ‘triumphant’?"
Luke: "Do they triumph?"
Sana: "Over what? Over their circumstances?"
Luke: "Yeah."
Sana: "Yeah. At the end of Companion, for example, you have a woman who’s in a really tough situation but she makes her life beautiful. The last thing she does in that story is make an omelet and put garnish on it. She makes up a beautiful meal inspite of everything else going on in her life. The way to be triumphant is to live in the present. Some characters can’t but others can. Everything in her life is going down the tubes but she will look good and she will do her hair and she will make a beautiful meal. That’s a form of triumph. I’m not sure triumph has to be climbing a snowy mountain peak. It can be about maintaining a certain kind of feminine dignity."
Luke: "Is your story that just came out in The New Yorker in this book?"
Sana: "Yes, the second to last one [‘The Repatriates’]. You didn’t read it, did you?"
Luke: "I read the whole book."
Sana: "That’s OK. I’m not judging."
Luke: "The dissolving of the marriage…"
"Do you belong to a school of writing?"
Sana: "I hope not."
Luke: "You’re certainly a realist."
Sana: "Yes. I’m not a fabulist. I’m inspired by life."
Luke: "How do you feel about writing about parts of life you know little about?"
Sana: "I do that."
We talk about research.
Sana: "Truth is transcontextual."
Luke: "What does that mean?"
Sana: "I don’t know where that came from. I read about the resurgence of Islam in Central Asia. I read about it from different angles. I made sure that things added up and there was nothing glaringly wrong with the story I was telling."
Luke: "What do all your characters have in common?"
Sana: "They’re all so different. What do we all have in common as human beings?"
Luke: "They’re almost all immigrants."
Sana: "Not all of them come to stay in America."
Sana thinks for more than ten seconds. "They’re kinda on their own, all of them, in some ways. We’re used to thinking of people coming and they’re immediately embraced by a community. And that’s the immigrant experience as we know it but a lot of people come without that support. They come to work as domestics. They’re on their own. I kinda feel that we as people are on our own. I feel like I’m on my own. That sense that there’s not much behind you. There’s not much to fall back on other than yourself. Maybe that is what’s depressing for you."
Luke: "Who wouldn’t that be depressing for?"
Sana: "It’s not depressing for me. They’re vulnerable characters but they’re tough because they know there is nobody to rely on. I’m drawn to people and to characters like that who have to just make it on their own. One of my characters — Nona — becomes a trophy wife in Moscow (in ‘There Will Be No Fourth Rome’). She makes her fate. She makes her compromises and she’s comfortable with them. My worldview came through in that character."
Luke: "Who would you say is your happiest character?"
Sana: "I write and I forget."
Luke: "Or any happy character?"
Sana laughs. "Happy is such a funny term because there are so many different ways to be happy. Americans often equate happiness with pleasure. Even as a writer, I’m not happy in a day-to-day way. It’s grueling. On a deeper level, you’re tapping into a deeper dimension than you would if you were doing something else. They may be moving toward a goal or trying to untangle things in their lives. Life is tough but it doesn’t mean that they are totally miserable.
"Happy characters? I’ll have to get back to you on that one.
"Happiness is like, Americans always fetishize happiness and harp a lot about it. I don’t always understand what is meant by that. Russians never ask you, ‘Are you happy?’ Happiness isn’t a category as important for people with a Russian mentality. The pursuit of happiness is a uniquely American way of thinking."
Luke: "If ten is ecstatic and zero is miserable, what happiness score would you give your average character in your book?"
Sana: "Five. And let’s just leave it at that. I feel like this interview should turn. What? Are you thinking about happiness? Do you feel like there are things that could make you happier right now?"
Luke: "Sure, but the happiness of your characters is as important a question as anything in life."
Sana: "Is that how you read characters? You wonder if they are happy or unhappy? Are there other ways of looking at a character’s psycho-spiritual state? No?"
Luke: "I read for pleasure. I don’t read for technical reasons. I can get enormous pleasure out of getting depressed in a book. I’m not reading a book to feel yippee! So, my primary response to what I read is emotional. I don’t have a degree in literature and I’m not terribly interested in literary criticism."
Sana: "Neither am I."
Luke: "These people are as real to me as you are. I spent maybe 20 minutes talking to you at LimmudLA. These characters are like people I meet in real life. I’m wondering about what to me are the most important questions in the world — ultimate meaning, happiness, purpose, fulfillment."
Sana: "Purpose and fulfillment are different from happiness. I think about those terms as well. Are they fulfilled? Are they working towards a purpose? We always read things from the cultural lens we come from. I don’t see someone who’s struggling as being necessarily unhappy."
Luke: "Neither do I."
"What’s your story with community? You mentioned that all your characters are alone and that you identified with that feeling. We typically replicate our experiences with community no matter which community we enter."
Sana: "I’ve always felt supported both by family and friends. I don’t feel like I live in a vacuum or that I’m an island. The sense that we’re on our own is more of a feeling, not because I haven’t felt people’s love. Jews always have a connection to a broader Jewish community. Are you asking me specifically what are my connections to a Jewish community?"
Luke: "I’ll talk about myself for one minute to use it as a springboard to ask you that same question."
Sana: "Please."
Luke: "I replicate my experiences of community wherever I go. They are all pretty much the same as when I was a child. One of my keenest memories is from second grade when I did not get invited to classmate Gavin Brown’s birthday party. My therapist suggested that I call my memoir, ‘The Uninvited.’ I go through life antagonizing a tremendous number of people. I’m always in danger of getting kicked out of a community but if I can hang in there with a community for a time, I will gradually and awkwardly work my way towards its middle. Without pushing myself into a community, I naturally isolate myself."
Sana: "You don’t strike me as particularly offensive."
Luke: "Are you a person completely different from your characters or are you a joiner?"
Sana: "I’m not a joiner. I’ve always been pretty independent and straight forward but I haven’t found that has alienated me. I respect where people are coming from so I don’t impose too much of myself on others. I don’t necessarily get super-influenced by others as well. I always give people the respect of their reasons. I tend to be nonjudgmental. When I meet new people, I try to enjoy their company as much as I can. I’d rather learn something from them than give them a particular impression of who I am. Maybe it’s easier if you are a woman to do that. I don’t take a lot of things personally. That experience you talked about of rejection at an early age, come on Luke, everybody’s gone through this. There’s always some snotty-nosed kid who doesn’t invite you to a birthday party. People always have unique reasons for doing things and it depends more on who they are than who you are. It’s hard to be a writer if you care a lot about what people think. Talent is not as necessary as a certain kind of temperament."
Luke: "When I say the phrase, ‘Join a community,’ what does that evoke in you?"
Sana: "I don’t tend to see communities as a group. I’m very much about dealing with people one on one. That’s where I get the most social pleasure, not from being the life of the party and telling some story that’s going to make everybody crack up. When I’m in a new environment, I tend to have intense conversations with one person and then another person. I don’t envision community the same way you do."
Luke: "How do you feel about subsuming your individual identity with a group identity?"
Sana: "’Subsuming’? That’s a strong word. I don’t think it has to be subsumed. Individual identity and group identity has never been in conflict for me. I always like learning new things from people but there are very few people who’ve been able to change who I am in a fundamental way."
Luke: "How does it feel to you to subsume your individual identity into a group identity?"
Sana: "It feels dystopic. The way you frame it, it feels like a strange nightmare scenario. Otherwise, I don’t think about it."
Luke: "You said earlier that you identify with the aloneness that all your characters feel. Is that correct?"
Sana pauses for ten seconds. "I don’t know. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t."
Luke: "How does being right-wing in your politics affect your relationships with other writers?"
Sana: "I’m not right-wing. I’m pretty moderate. I’m socially liberal. It doesn’t affect it all. I have pretty vanilla views in most things."
Luke: "You said to me at LimmudLA that you were a Republican."
Sana: "Yeah. I don’t always vote the party line. I’m a small government, federalist type of person. On a lot of individual issues, I probably fall more to the left. I think I’m a very tolerant person and an open-minded person. In terms of my relationships, where I stand politically does not have a lot of consequence."
Luke: "Do you believe there’s universal good and evil?"
Sana: "I have a theory about good and evil. I think good is whatever makes us connect with other people and evil is whatever makes us put up boundaries. The force of the ego makes us want to defend a particular projection of ourselves. So we operate under the illusion that we are separate from others. That leads to evil in the world. Whatever makes our ego boundaries break down and connect with other people in a genuine way, also leads to good. That’s a principle I try to live by."
Luke: "By the standard you just elucidated, are you more good or evil?"
Sana: "I don’t know. I can’t judge myself. When I die, I’ll be judged by God. I don’t go around thinking about good and evil. When you start thinking that way, you become a self-righteous asshole."
Luke: "Do you think some civilizations are superior to other civilizations?"
Sana: "Whatever civilizations have survived up to this time in history, they are clearly doing something right. Some civilizations put more of a focus on individual rights and defending civil liberties. America tries more than most countries to defend individual civil liberties. That’s the yardstick by which I measure whether one society is superior to another."
Luke: "Would you say that the United States today is a more civilized country than Russia?"
Sana: "I don’t know. That’s a really complicated question. Russia has had a very complicated history."
Luke: "Would you say communism is evil?"
Sana: "Communism is an idea. Can an idea be evil? I don’t know. Communism certainly didn’t erase the sadistic inclinations in individuals from what we see in Russia and the history of the Soviet Union. I can’t say a concept is evil. One thing I can give communism credit for is that by virtue of being communist, Russia brought its country into the 20th Century. Within decades, communism took an agrarian society and made it an industrial society, a process that in Europe took centuries. It was communism that made a huge portion of the Russian people bourgeoisie. I’m not a dogmatic person, so I’m not going to slap a label on things. Russia in the 20th Century does not have a strong history of defending human rights."
Luke: "But you wouldn’t say that communism as practiced in the Soviet Union is evil?"
Sana: "In general, I wouldn’t make such a blanket statement. I would have to launch into a complicated discussion about it."
Luke: "What about Nazism? Would you call Nazism evil?"
Sana: "You mean like fascism?"
Luke: "I mean Nazism as practiced in Germany between 1933-1945."
Sana: "Well, it certainly was responsible for the murder of millions of people. So yeah, to that degree, it was evil. And communism was responsible for the murder of millions of Russians. To that degree it was also not a manifestation of people’s best qualities."
Luke: "What, if any, moral responsibilities do you have to society as a writer?"
Sana: "I don’t have grand and lofty ambitions. Once writers start doing that, they get a little heavy handed. It’s hard enough to tell a good story and to then say something about the world. We often don’t know the net result of our actions, which is a good thing. To reflect the world back to itself, I don’t know if it’s a noble goal, it’s one purpose. It takes all kinds. I don’t go around thinking I’m making the world a better place. That’s what communists did in Russia. They went around thinking they were making the world a better place. It’s exactly that kind of thinking that leads to what you would call evil."
Luke: "But it’s not what you would call evil?"
Sana: "No, no. Let me rephrase. An effort to try to make the world a better place in any kind of self-righteous way doesn’t always end up in the world being a better place. I would never have the hubris to say I’m making the world a better place. Communism tried to achieve this good for the future and made the present a living hell. Is that good?"
Luke: "No."
"This is good. I realize that a lot of these questions must seem weird but these are just the questions I think about all the time when I encounter literature and when I encounter life."
Sana: "You’re just working through your own stuff. You’re going to ask whatever questions are on your mind at a particular point in life, right?"
Luke: "This is the template I’ve been asking everyone for years."
Sana: "Good and evil? Really?"
Luke: "Yeah."
Sana: "Huh. What does everyone answer?"
Luke: "Unless they’re active in an organized religion, they answer what you do."
Sana: "Am I Godless?"
I think for ten seconds. "I remember asking the author of ‘The Jewish Century,’ Yuri Slezkine, if one could call the United States a morally superior country to the Soviet Union. He said no."
Sana: "Did I say no to that? I don’t know. Your questions seem like they are leading questions, frankly, which makes someone a bit weary of answering them. It’s hard to feel rapport with your interviewer when you feel there’s a veneer of judgment radiating from the voice. You seemed like a good cool guy but I kinda feel like there’s a right and wrong answer with the way you’re phrasing your questions. Maybe there is. Maybe you have a thesis that you are looking for support of. There’s not a whole lot I can say that’s going to control how you interpret it. Right?"
Luke: "Well, that’s bad interviewing technique on my part because as soon as you put a judgment in a question, you’re not going to get a good answer. I work really hard to not put a judgment in a question. So if I fail in that respect, I fail. My interviews rise or fall with the rapport I develop with the people I interview. It will be interesting to see how other people react. I’ll send you a copy of the transcript."
Sana: "Do you have your own questions as part of that transcript or is it like an NKVD interrogation where it’s just my side, and your side is flat and polished? You’d be a great interrogator for the KGB."
Luke: "Thank you. People say that. I sent you a link when I first emailed you with the 30 or so other interviews I did [with writers of Jewish fiction]."
Sana: "I read them. They were pretty great."
Luke: "Well, I used the same questions with you that I used with them."
Sana: "I don’t remember the good and evil stuff. Oh well."
"So how’s everything else?"
Luke: "It’s OK. I’m just struggling to make a living as a writer. That’s what I think about day in and day out."
Sana: "I hear that. It’s tough."
Luke: "That’s the main issue in my life for years. I’ve been making my living as a blogger for almost eleven years."
Sana: "Your blogs are pretty widely read. A friend of mine was telling me about it and I hadn’t even mentioned you."
Luke: "I’m one of the first bloggers to make a living at it. I have a wide audience. Your experience may vary, but the thing most people say I’m best at is interviews."
Sana: "You’re thorough."
Luke: "The drawback of doing interviews is that they are exhausting to transcribe. We’ve spoken for two hours and this is going to take me twelve hours to transcribe."
Sana: "I’ve got to run."