July 31, 2023
Adams’s bracing debut novel is both an indictment and a backhanded appreciation of late-20th-century America from the point of view of an émigré from the Soviet Union. Ten-year-old Dinah Ash is living with her grandmother Babby in Leningrad in the 1970s when she’s chosen for the prestigious Vaganova School of ballet. She trains for years, and falls head over heels for a fellow dancer, but once she joins the prestigious Kirov ballet company at 17 she learns she will not thrive there for one reason: she is a Jew. Her boyfriend is sent to Afghanistan to fight the mujahideen, Babby dies, and life under Gorbachev in the renamed St. Petersburg becomes rampant with “nationalism. Rising, rabid, spreading ethno-nationalism, anti-Semitism, anti-anything-not-Russian-ism.” Dinah resolves to leave and ends up in Philadelphia, where her first years are miserable: working at a Russian grocery store, she pines for her homeland, which, in spite of the deprivations, still feels richer and deeper in her memory than life surrounded by strip-mall ugliness and different forms of racism. She eventually joins a dance company, only to become gravely ill. In the book’s first chapter, Dinah reveals she has a virulent form of cancer and foretells the deaths of most of the other Russian characters after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Adams’s affecting insight into their adopted home and the Russia they left—Adams emigrated from the old Soviet Union, too—is well worth the troika ride.