Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration (Library of Modern Jewish Literature)

Shrayer, Maxim D.

ISBN 10: 0815608934 / ISBN 13: 9780815608936

Editore: Syracuse University Press, 2007

remainder mark, some shelfwear Standard-sized. Codice articolo 0815608934-01

Riassunto:

Recounts the author's immigration to the United States from Moscow in 1987, focusing on the period he and his family spent in Vienna and Italy on the way to America, as well as his romantic relationships there.

Product Description: In 1987, a young Jewish man, the central figure in this captivating book, leaves Moscow for good with his parents. They celebrate their freedom in opulent Vienna and spend two months in Rome and the coastal resort of Ladispoli. While waiting in Europe for a U.S. refugee visa, the book's twenty-year-old poet quenches his thirst for sexual and cultural discovery. Through his colorful Austrian and Italian misadventures, he experiences the shock, thrill, and anonymity of being in a Western democracy, running into European roadblocks while shedding Soviet social taboos. As he anticipates entering a new life in America, he movingly describes the baggage that exiles bring with them, from the inescapable family ties to the sweet cargo of memory. An emigration story, "Waiting for America" explores the rapid expansion of identity at the cusp of a new, American life. Told in a revelatory first-person narrative, "Waiting for America" is also a vibrant love story, in which the romantic protagonist is torn between Russian and Western women. Filled with poignant humor and reinforced by hope and idealism, the author's confessional voice carries the reader in the same way one is carried through literary memoirs like Tolstoy's "Childhood", "Boyhood", "Youth", Hemingway's "Moveable Feast", or Nabokov's "Speak", "Memory". Babel, Sebald, and Singer - all transcultural masters of identity writing - are the coordinates that help to locate Waiting for America on the greater map of literature.

Dati bibliografici

Titolo: Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration (...
Casa editrice: Syracuse University Press
Data di pubblicazione: 2007
Legatura: Hardcover
Condizione: Good