All Russians Love Birch Trees

The narrator of Grjasnowa’s debut novel, Masha Kogan, speaks multiple languages but she doesn’t feel at home anywhere. Not in Germany, where her Russian-Jewish family immigrated to while fleeing war in Azerbaijan in 1987. German policy may be to build up its tiny Jewish community, but in practice immigrants of all kinds (especially Masha’s friends from Muslim backgrounds) are viewed with distrust. Not in Israel, where she moves after getting a job there as a translator and is suspect—as a Jew who speaks Arabic but not Hebrew. Her computer, which has Arabic stickers on it, is destroyed by guards at the airport because it is viewed as a security risk. Masha discovers Israel to be a jangled, violent place whose residents are either in denial about the violence around them or have trauma-induced stress disorders. Grjasnowa, who was longlisted for the 2012 German Book Prize, reveals herself to be an expert chronicler of modern displacement and of the scars left by the wars that followed the Soviet Union’s breakup—wars that most in the West managed to overlook or forget. She’s less able, though, to make us care about Masha, who, for all her grieving, flirting, and arguing, is less interesting than her circumstances. (Jan.)