Emigration of Jews from the former USSR to Israel, the United States, and Germany created circumstances for the emergence of literary fiction in the migrants’ adopted tongues—Hebrew, English, and German, respectively—in the last two decades. Parts of this phenomenon had been studied by Miriam Finkelstein, Natasha Gordinsky, Alex Moshkin, Karolina Krasuska, Maggie Levantovskaya, Adrian Wanner, and others, including the author of this review. Sergii Gurbych's Mother Tongue, Other Tongue: Soviet-born Jewish Writers in Their New Language Environment, however, is the first book-length study of émigré authors in all three of these adopted languages. This book, therefore, represents an important effort to size up this phenomenon in its multilingual heterogeneity. At the same time, the book lacks analytical rigor and manifests notable shortcomings in theorizing the broader phenomenon beyond a perfunctory reliance on reader-response theory, which does not offer the author much assistance in developing a sustained central argument.
In the introduction, Gurbych notes that authors writing in their second tongues have a “choice of language [which] reflects their intended readership” and that, therefore, the scholar researching this phenomenon, studies “how the information enclosed in a message is coded by the writer, who is representative of one culture, and then decoded by the reader, who belongs to another culture” (10). The formative culture in this equation, as Gurbych rightly notes, is “Soviet” rather than “Russian,” as several other scholars have termed it (11); “Soviet” and “Russian” are not necessarily or even often synonymous despite established misleading associations about the supposed interchangeability of the two terms. As such, the writers in question can become transcultural rather than multicultural and thus “depict the ways to go beyond [the] society” from which they have originally come (18). Chap. 1, which focuses on the book's methodology and provides some historical background, further elucidates its focus on writers whose work manifests “transculturality” (32) or transculturalism, as used in most of the book—their ability to address life in their adopted countries with reference to their Soviet backgrounds—rather than “on the so-called ‘Russianness’ in their work” (29). Here Gurbych ponders, among other questions, whether there is something that might be called a “post-Soviet English” (39–40), deployed by the Anglophone immigrant writers to decenter concepts established in English (“the Second World War”) by introducing intro broader circulation terms (“the Great Patriotic War”) brought over from the USSR (40). Chap. 2 focuses on the Hebrew-language works of Soviet-born Israeli writers Boris Zaidman, Alex Epstein, and Alona Kimhi; Chap. 3 discusses the English-language works of Soviet-born US writers Lara Vapnyar and Gary Shteyngart; Chap. 4 deals with the works of Soviet-born German-language writers Katja Petrowskaja, Olga Grjasnowa, and Alina Bronsky. Works of some of these writers should be well familiar to scholars and general readers; for others, Gurbych's book offers a useful introduction, including biographical notes about the authors.
The book's significant shortcomings come from Gurbych's reliance on needing to imagine a reader who, in his estimation, may or may not be able to understand specific linguistic games of the writers in question in their adopted tongues. In imagining such a reader, at times Gurbych invents potential miscomprehensions based on flimsy evidence (as, for example, when he suggests that not all Israeli readers would understand Boris Zaidman's use of Hebrew military slang or Biblical associations [67], although it would be reasonable to assume the contrary in a society where nearly all Jews are expected to serve in the army and receive secondary schooling that includes the Hebrew Bible). At other times, Gurbych's attempts to track down the implied reader seem to miss some of the central aspects of this or that text's plot (when he, for example, faults the narrator of Shteyngart's Absurdistan for having “no clear understanding of the concept of multiculturalism” when this is precisely the central aspect of the novel's relation to this term, 145). Such examples, when taken as a whole, produce a rather disjointed picture, and are, moreover, buoyed by the book's disjointed organization that siloes discussions of a rather large number of texts in separate subchapters. For all the promise of its trilingual approach to the subject matter, Mother Tongue, Other Tongue represents somewhat of a lost opportunity; other scholars who possess the linguistic skills similar to Gurbych's would find ample reasons to revisit this important subject with more nuance and careful close readings that it deserves.
