Klotsvog

Russian Library

by Margarita Khemlin, Lisa Hayden (Translation)

Klotsvog is a novel about being Jewish in the Soviet Union and the historical trauma of World War II--and it's a novel about the petty dramas and demons of one wonderfully vain woman. Maya Abramovna Klotsvog has had quite a life, and she wants you to know all about it. Selfish, garrulous, and thoroughly entertaining, she tells us where she came from, who she didn't get along with, and what became of all her husbands and lovers.

In Klotsvog, Margarita Khemlin creates a first-person narrator who is both deeply self-absorbed and deeply compelling. From Maya's perspective, Khemlin unfurls a retelling of the Soviet Jewish experience that integrates the historical and the personal into her protagonist's vividly drawn inner and outer lives. Maya's life story flows as a long monologue, told in unfussy language dense with Khemlin's magnificently manipulated Soviet clich�s and matter-of-fact descriptions of Soviet life. Born in a center of Jewish life in Ukraine, she spent the war in evacuation in Kazakhstan. She has few friends but several husbands, and her relationships with her relatives are strained at best. The war looms over Klotsvog, and the trauma runs deep, as do the ambiguities and ambivalences of Jewish identity. Lisa Hayden's masterful translation brings this compelling character study full of dark, sly humor and new perspectives on Jewish heritage and survival to an English-speaking audience.

Genres: Fiction, Russia, Ukraine, Jewish, Historical Fiction, Russian Literature, Classics

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Margarita Khemlin, Ukrainian author, born in U.S.S.R.

Reviews

[Alison Hardtmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maya Klotsvog is just doing what she needs to to get by, to get ahead, to have a moment to herself, to put a little aside against the hard times. She's living the Soviet Union, in Kiev, and her passport marks her as a Jew. She spent the war in exile in Kazakhstan and she's all too aware of the precariousness of life for those of Jewish descent in the Soviet Union. She also knows that she's going to have to do what is needed to get ahead.

As Maya narrates her own story, it's clear that she's massaging the details, of her first relationship, then her hasty marriage to her boss, a sad man who lost his entire family to the Nazis, then her second marriage, and the next relationship, meant to make things just a little easier. Maya is self-centered and manipulative, using her beauty to avoid working, or to improve her circumstances, but she uses her relentlessness in service to her family occasionally as well and I was left with the impression of having read about one of the few personality types that could improve their circumstances under an intolerable regime. Just because she left a trail of destroyed lives behind her is no reason not to root for Maya to finally get what she wants, at least until she sees something else.

Margarita Khemlin was a Jewish-Ukrainian novelist and short story writer whose work has not been widely available outside of the former Soviet Union. Columbia University Press has begun publishing untranslated works under the Russian Library imprint. This novel is both a fascinating character study and a stark look a what ordinary life looked like in the middle of the last century in the Soviet Union.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ukrainian author Margarita Khemlin presents us here with a completely unlikeable protagonist, a woman who is manipulative, selfish, self-obsessed and willing to ride roughshod over the desires and needs of those around her – including husbands and children – to get what she wants. Maya Abramovna Klotsvog is also totally un-self-aware, unable to judge the effect her actions have on others and blind to the damage she causes. The novel is in the form of a long confessional monologue and we only get Maya’s take on matters, but the reader is aware, unlike Maya, of the carnage she leaves behind. It’s a fascinating portrait of a self-centred woman and one I found truly compelling. The book is also about life in the Soviet Union and the dangers of being Jewish, like Maya, in an anti-semitic society. What Maya has seen and experienced in her life doesn’t excuse her but it does make her more comprehensible. Life was always precarious under Stalin and even more so for Jews. It’s a complex novel and one which can be read on many levels. The introduction is a great help in unravelling some of the themes, and certainly a knowledge of the time and place is pretty much essential to the reader’s understanding, but even so anyone will appreciate this portrait of a deeply unsympathetic and self-deluding woman.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills) · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good! Frankly any book that Lisa Hayden chooses to translate is a superb read!

I'll just leave you with what Lara Vapnyar writes in the foreword on the Book That Made Her Weep For Hours:

"I have to start with a confession. It’s not unusual for me to cry over a book. I choke up when I reread the scene of the old Prince Nikolai’s death in War and Peace. I tear up when Ennis calls Jack “little darling” in Brokeback Mountain. I start weeping when I read about dying children squabbling over an orange ball in the oncology ward in People Like That Are the Only People Here. I dab my eyes with the tip of a tissue and go on reading.

What is unusual for me is to bawl over a book for hours. To bawl, to sob, to go through an entire box of tissues, to feel devastated for days afterward. And yet this is what happened when I finished Margarita Khemlin’s Klotsvog. And these weren’t sweet tears of empathy either—I cried from shame, from horror, from the deepest self-loathing. I felt like I needed to go to a house of worship and beg for forgiveness, except that I’m not religious and had no idea who to beg or how."

It's that kind of novel! Don't just add to your TBR list; be sure to read #Klotsvog21!!

[Davida Chazan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5* If you’ve ever wanted to understand what the term “unreliable narrator” means, the story of Maya Abramovna Klotsvog, who lives in the USSR after WWII, by Margarita Khemlin is an excellent example. Told like a memoir, this novel translated by Lisa C. Hayden, seems simple but is very different. See what I thought about it in my #bookreview here. https://tcl-bookreviews.com/2019/08/2...

[Britta Böhler · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

[Subashini · Rating 3 out of 5]

Klotsvog is translated from Russian by Lisa Hayden and gives a glimpse of the life of a Jewish woman in the Soviet Ukraine. Maya is a unique anti-heroine; beautiful, self-obsessed, and difficult. Her struggles as a woman and mother are both poignant and hard to take because Maya invites drama and sadness into her life on account of her stubborn character. The end is particularly moving and while on the whole I found the book's ironic tone compelling--there's something to be said about that Soviet sensibility of being bleak and funny at the same time--I didn't warm to the book as I expected. It's terrible how antisemitism ruled and conditioned the lives of Maya and her family, but on the other hand I grew weary of her self-absorbed, bourgeois ambitions. Because a novel of this kind, told entirely from the narrator's acerbic point of view, can be pretty subjective--how you get on with this book will probably depend a lot on how you get on with Maya. (And no, I don't mean in a reductive sense of "likeability"; it's just a matter of clicking with a protagonist as one might with a real person, I suppose.)

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I guess if one was looking for a literary bummer with which to pass the time, Klotsvog would fit the bill. It's a story, written by a Ukraine-born Muscovite, about an indefatigably solipsistic woman who sheds partners and children like Kleenex.

"You, Mayechka, are made from a different dough. Like matzo. Unleavened and hard."

There's more to it than that – her awfulness, her awareness of social standing and her denial of her Jewish roots are clear commentaries on Stalinist purges and on the difficulty of life both during and after the second world war. But foremost is the portrait of Maya Abramovna Klotsvog: a woman who believes she is smarter and better than everyone else, but who also, apparently, doesn't give a fuck who she irritates in the pursuit of her desires.

(Seriously, kids? Fuck 'em off. Husbands? Ditto. Jobs? Well, who needs them? After all, when you're this demanding, you'll forever find someone who'll carry out your plans.)

What Khemlin presents is a nuanced description of life in the 1950s and following decades, with all the digression and niggling you might find in an elderly relative's reminiscences. It's delightfully bitchy and exhaustingly grim, but the compulsion is to push on through the familial expansions and contractions.



Don't be looking for chapters, though, as this novel eschews them. It's written as an oral transcription, a typeset form of skaz, which allows the narrative to illustrate the character without direct description. We're not provided with any portrait of the narrator beyond what she mentions herself; and her descriptions are obviously as untrustworthy and changeable as her intentions. The spoken word is important, and the short bursts of narrative – there's never hugely extended passages, only snippets, as befits moment-to-moment recall – renders the narrator in a form of chiaroscuro.

She lies. She plots. She makes abominable choices. But everything is reasoned, everything is planned out. Maya's life has been one of planning and playing the angles, and we're shown behind the mirror, though often less glamorously than she would intend. Indeed, the repeated phrases Maya uses  – 'But that's not my point' the most obvious – hint at a portrait the author would not like us to see. They reveal how her life is constructed through skirting the truth; how one's self-censorship, one's rewriting of history is an act of self-preservation that's so hardwired, in certain circumstances, that it's impossible to ignore.

Klotsvog is a remarkable novel to read, but a difficult one to like. This is beyond the grimness that comes with the territory: though the sardonic overtones of much of the area's literature – at least, the comprehension of text as such by non-Russian readers – is here, as it is in other texts I’ve read, there’s something more. Something more flighty and at once more calculating. Life is, as expected, an enormous bummer, but I’m hard pressed to think of a character that’s more geared towards her own destruction, her own prevention of happiness than the titular Maya. It's breathtakingly dark, and unremittingly fatalistic.

The strange thing about this book is the fact that I have to give it such a good review when it’s so incredibly unlikable. Maya is a horrible, horrible person, who seems to have reached no redemption at all by the end of the tale – only delusion. But the writing kept drawing me on throughout.

This is not at all a book I would normally have considered reading, given my lack of familiarity with Khemlin's work, but I'm very glad I did. And while the read was distinctly uncomfortable, that is undoubtedly its point. If you can take being discomfited for a couple of hours, you'll experience a finely-drawn portait of a horrible person – and through that, an intriguing picture of horrible times.

It's very much recommended if you, like me, are the sort of person who voluntarily submits to Michael Haneke films.

This ebook was supplied by Netgalley in return for an honest review. It's due to be released in August 2019.

[Alison Hardtmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maya Klotsvog is just doing what she needs to to get by, to get ahead, to have a moment to herself, to put a little aside against the hard times. She's living the Soviet Union, in Kiev, and her passport marks her as a Jew. She spent the war in exile in Kazakhstan and she's all too aware of the precariousness of life for those of Jewish descent in the Soviet Union. She also knows that she's going to have to do what is needed to get ahead.

As Maya narrates her own story, it's clear that she's massaging the details, of her first relationship, then her hasty marriage to her boss, a sad man who lost his entire family to the Nazis, then her second marriage, and the next relationship, meant to make things just a little easier. Maya is self-centered and manipulative, using her beauty to avoid working, or to improve her circumstances, but she uses her relentlessness in service to her family occasionally as well and I was left with the impression of having read about one of the few personality types that could improve their circumstances under an intolerable regime. Just because she left a trail of destroyed lives behind her is no reason not to root for Maya to finally get what she wants, at least until she sees something else.

Margarita Khemlin was a Jewish-Ukrainian novelist and short story writer whose work has not been widely available outside of the former Soviet Union. Columbia University Press has begun publishing untranslated works under the Russian Library imprint. This novel is both a fascinating character study and a stark look a what ordinary life looked like in the middle of the last century in the Soviet Union.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know exactly what I want to rate this book! I find the study of Judaism in the Soviet Union, and even the main character of Maya as compelling (if also depressing.) But I wasn’t the biggest fan of the passive style. I’m an easy grader, though, so maybe a four stars?


Anywho. This book roughly takes place in the 1950s and 1960s in the Soviet Union, with just a little bit of a callback to the 1940s. We are following the main character of Maya Klotsvog, she with an unusual surname. “I don’t know it’s literal meaning. If anyone does, please tell me” Maya says by way of greeting at the beginning of the story.

Indeed, it’s a conversational style of writing, which makes it easy for the narrative to go on tangents, occasionally highlighted by the character backtracking with “but that’s not the point.” She’s a relatively obsessive character with a bit of a chip on her shoulder, and I’d say definitely in the “unlikeable” category. So readers beware.

We’re basically following Maya through her young adulthood to later adulthood, which takes her from a Ukrainian village to Moscow. But even more than that, she is a distinct nationality—she is Jewish—and in fact her formative years include fleeing her hometown and the death of her father when the Nazis invaded. Since then she’s lived with a brand of Jewish trauma, but it’s hardly just about the Nazis—it’s more about Soviet antisemitism.

And it’s not about hiding in a corner, either. Maya is a vain and proud woman who lives loudly—going through husbands (many of whom adore her) like yesterday’s news. She’s generally self-centered and unsympathetic to others, though she does help a few people in her own way.

She ultimately has two children—a son, Misha and a daughter, Ella. Misha she’s terrified will get too chummy with his Jewish ancestry, thanks to some formative experiences with her mother and past husbands. (As an adult, Misha completely distances himself from his mother.) Ella, much like Maya herself, embraces the antisemitism of the day, but Ella’s is much more pernicious. Maya quietly distances herself from Judaism, and arguably haphazardly since though she takes pains to hide her accent and history, she still has dealings with members of the community. Ella’s antisemitism deals in violent stereotypes and even psychological campaigns against her mother. As Maya hears from another character about Ella’s generation near the end of the book: “She’s scared because she ended up Jewish. All children are afraid of the dark. And Jewishness is akin to the dark for children if they don’t engage with it.”

This is an emotionally astute novel—free from the melodramatic trappings of the Big Brother is Watching Soviet culture, but insidious in its own way. I think it speaks to a particular type of antisemitism, too, one where the people have largely turned on themselves. And tellingly, Khemlin (and, I should say, her translator Lisa C. Hayden) do this not through the eyes of a righteous character, but a flawed one.

I tend to argue a lot (with myself) about the balance between blaming the society and the self for flawed characters. And surely there are other Jews in this book who aren’t nearly as insufferable. But ultimately I hate binaries, and I think the author deftly proves that Maya’s predisposition is both about society/history AND steeped in free will. The story is also both depressing, and also moving in its way.

The rambling, gossipy writing style isn’t my thing, but more good over bad here, ultimately. Glad I gave it a go.

[KimM · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a raw look at life from the point of view of a young Jewish woman in the Ukraine in the post WWII 1950s and 1960s. I say "raw" because that's how it feels to read Maya's account of her life. She's beautiful and intelligent but she's also manipulative, conniving and controlling, and, I would say, somewhat cold. Is this her given personality or is she the product of her circumstances? I think when people have been forced to do and see unspeakable things to survive they are deeply and eternally affected and develop a lack of faith in humankind for the rest of their lives. I believe Maya only trusted herself and her own power to obtain a better life for herself and her children. What she didn't anticipate is that this cold ambition would alienate the ones she loved the most. I think this story resonates with mothers everywhere. Sometimes we push too hard, interfere too much and in general, push others away in our efforts to create something we think is "better".

"But that's not the point".

Thank you for NetGalley for the ARC

[Olga Zilberbourg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb translation of an important book. Maya is a Jewish woman trying to build her life in the Soviet Union, starting from her ancestral village that had been destroyed by Nazis. The author inhabits Maya's psyche very closely, though clearly keeps her distance from the narrator by highlighting certain quirks in Maya's language, her preference for a few set phrases -- exceptionally captured in English. What does Maya want out of life? It seems, at times, that she wants to run away from her Jewish history. But running away is as impossible as it is avoiding prejudice, as it is to avoid saving her children the trauma of being perceived as other.

[Linden · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Soviet Jewish woman with a total lack of self awareness goes through life completely ignorant of the consequences of her actions.

[Arnie Kahn · Rating 3 out of 5]

What an unusual novel! I enjoyed reading this and was surprised that I didn’t see sooner the true character of the narrator. Maya is a most interesting and unusual narrator of the novel. I found it interesting to learn about Jewish life in Ukraine after WWII up through the 1970s and the discrimination even after Stalin’s death. Unused to Russian literature, I found it difficult keep all the characters straight with the multiple names for the same person; the same person might be called three different names, all within the same paragraph. I ended up having to make a flow chart and list all the names and relationships. If you get the English translation, I suggest you not read either the forward or the translator’s note until you’ve finished the novel. They give away too much and I think it's more interesting to learn about the narrator as you read rather than before hand.

[Rachel Glass · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to the publishers for a free copy of the ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest opinion.

This is a book I'll have to figure out my rating for as I write my review.

Maya is surviving in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s with only her mother and an aunt or uncle. The background of her war experiences sweep by almost in passing, as if almost irrelevant, as do references to the tenuous position of Jewish families at the time. The introductory note rightly points this out as a counter to Maya's personality.

We see Maya thrusting her way through life, desperate to be secure (financially and in the truth of her son's parentage remaining unknown), tearing through relationships without much thought for those she's using. I found her such an unpleasant and difficult character - it's clear she has experienced severe trauma but the pathologically selfish way she behaves is extremely difficult to read. An unreliable narrator to the core, we only see her effect on others through their actions or through what they accuse her of being (which she always denies). She constantly states her opinion 'as a pedagogue' despite having barely taught. Maya does seem to experience some growth by the end, but there is not really a sense of closure or hope.

The novel is written in a very staccato style, with the constant refrain of 'But that's not my point' (leading us to question what her point is), and Maya comes across as quite emotionless - if she ever experiences a feeling she tells us, 'This is when I experienced this feeling' rather than allowing us to sense it from her words or actions, which has a curiously distancing effect.

This is not a book I particularly enjoyed (the character of Maya just left such a bitter taste in my mouth) but I found it interesting and wrestled greatly with my feelings about its protagonist. I'm giving it 4 stars for now for this reason but may come back and change it when I've had more time to think about it!

[HudsonPeavy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was great. It took me way too long to read partially because of finals but also because the main character suuuuuuuuuucks. Like, that’s the point, but she’s just so awful. I wound up shouting at her every other page out of frustration which really slowed me down. She’s like every awful person you know wrapped up in one and just so so believable. If you’re looking to get your blood pressure up, this is the one.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got such a kick out of the main character of this book: a deeply traumatized, immature, and self-focused woman. As she recounts the first forty years of her life, she comes across almost as an incompetent femme fatale, leaving behind a strew of ex-husbands and lovers in her wake. But her voice is so charming and sardonic, I kept rooting for her life to right itself. The last ten pages are a gut punch.

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was so astonishingly excellent, and the author or at least the protagonist is in the truest sense what can only be described as my "soul sister," although the phrase may seem empty. The degree to which I relate to her is at the fundamental or blood level. Along with Lara from Pasternak's (specifically, the book) Doctor Zhivago, we are all birds of one feather. To solve the Lara equation, the Maya equation, is to solve my own equation. If I can crack the code to the seed "problem" in their lives, I can in my own. That makes it a personally important book for me. Lara in Zhivago offered no clues, but with Maya I now see it, through this author's extremely deft work.

That is, this is a person who is loved by men, but not enough-- not enough for them to leave their wives, not enough for them to act, not enough for them to truly care. In Maya's case, this even extends to her own children. I realized that it's because the part of her that needs to be loved or needs people is gone. It may have been there once, but the last time was childhood. That she doesn't actually need anyone gives her an aloofness-- people feel that they are not needed, that she can get by just fine without them, and so they ultimately leave her alone. And even while gripped by the terribleness of it, she is still relentlessly fine and even defiantly content, deep down. The problem is that, by being a human, she actually does need to be loved-- this is like a larger consciousness, one could even say God, that overrides her fine-ness, and it irritates her and she spits in its face. She's not going to give her love to anyone who doesn't entirely deserve it, all the way through, with no gaps, yet no one will take the leap on their own without her giving them the same. She gives up and sacrifices much in the material realm for people, but still holds onto everything in her heart and all of its riches, so the material sacrifices don't do the trick. Yet, why should she take a leap of faith? No one has ever given her any reason to. How do other people do it? She's like a stubborn child, loved only by "God," who is like a parent continually trying to teach her the lesson to be truly vulnerable.

Well, I digress... it's a beautiful, intensely well-told story, that remains comfortable and with a hint of magic even while going to very dark places. It's also, in a literary sense, an extremely "important" book. It shows what it has meant to be Jewish in Russia. The country has graduated from pogroms at this point in history, but anti-Semitism is deep enough to make little fully Jewish children themselves anti-Semite extremists, to fit in. This is the story that has led to people like me-- Americans with their genealogy ending abruptly, untraceable just three generations back, the ghosts of traditions and languages even still, but for the most part, washed of anything that would let you return to Jewish community... as your ancestors very much intended, as a result of going via Russia. We weren't the mensches. Survival was chosen.  I can physically feel my ancestors' consternation and wrath at even the thought of having a mezuzah or lighting candles in the window. And, decisions around these things are like a character in this book-- the origins of people and things felt today, here, unfold at this place and time in history, shown at the intimate level in this book. The mezuzah, and its particular fate, is a distinct member of the cast.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Smart, sad, very Russian. Indelibly drawn main character, well worth reading, and beautifully translated.

[Pascale · Rating 3 out of 5]

A powerful book which I feel I only partially understood in this English translation. Clearly, most of the characters in this story come to dislike and despise its narrator, Maya Klotsvog, including her 2 children by 2 different men, Misha and Ella. In her introduction, Lara Vapnyar suggests that "others might even go so far as to see her as a self-serving monster who is lying in her confession in order to dupe the reader into thinking that she is innocent." Later Vapnyar asserts that Maya "basically destroys" the life of her first husband, Fima. I must be a particularly naive reader because I fail to see Maya as a monster at all. Yes, she is ruthless, and bosses people around. Yes, she lies to Fima about Misha, who is in fact the child of her first, married, lover, Viktor Kutsenko, and later she gets Miroslav to marry her by pretending to be pregnant by him. But if she is far from blameless, she is first and foremost a victim of an authoritarian and racist régime. Maya starts the account of her life with one of literature's greatest understatements: "I was born in 1930 and - like my whole generation - saw too much, things that weren't pretty." Maya doesn't go on to describe the multiple horrors she must have witnessed, but to recall tersely how sad she was over the loss of a favorite dress she had not time to pack when she was forced to evacuate her hometown of Ostyor during the war. It doesn't seem all that surprising to me that she turns into a person who values the material possessions so hard to come by in Soviet Russia. Maya relies on her mother and step-father to help her out with her son, and later with her first husband Fima, whom she foists on them. However, I can't see how she is to blame for Fima's descent into alcoholism, which seems to be the result of his incurable sadness over the death of his first wife and family. If someone doesn't keep up their end of the bargain, it's Fima rather than Maya. It is also clear to me that it is with her son's safety in mind that she is has him adopted by Miroslav. Having a Ukrainian passport instead of a Jewish one is obviously preferable, and in my view Misha is grossly ungrateful to his mother. Maya doesn't connect any better with her daughter by her third husband Marik, who is Jewish. Maya and Ella are disappointed in each other, Maya because her daughter is overweight and an indifferent student, Ella because she can't forgive her mother for her coldness, but also simply for being Jewish. Why she doesn't hold that against her father as much remains a bit of a mystery. I see Maya's story as the tragedy of a natural survivor whose every initiative, good or bad, backfires and antagonizes people further. Did I get this book completely wrong?

[Daisy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an earlier note I made for myself about this book, I said I hoped to read it once it was translated. Or if my Russian suddenly improved (ha). Not only was it finally translated, it was translated by someone I actually met/know (virtually, then really): Lisa Hayden-Espenschade. She did an incredible job, loyal to Margarita Khemlin's intentions, language and story.
Maya Klotsvog is annoying and oblivious even though she means well. I rolled my eyes a lot at her but I loved this. For any Russophile--I recommend you fall into this deeply.

[Lisa Hayden Espenschade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love reading Margarita Khemlin's work because she is such an alchemist, creating surprisingly vivid worlds and complex characters out of very simple language. Maya Klotsvog, the narrator of Klotsvog, is a Jewish woman from Ukraine who tells the story of her life, from evacuation as a child during World War 2 through difficulties with her husbands and children.

(There's more on my blog, here.)

[Pennie Larina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Это просто прекрасно. И стилистически, и по смыслу, и по всему. Редкий случай, когда я не смотрю на книгу отстраненно и не оцениваю: даа, ничегооо, неплохо, а втягиваюсь внутрь и уже ничего не могу оценить.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

With thanks to Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings for my discovery of this book, my choice for #WITMonth turned out to be compelling reading. Margarita Khemlin's Klotsvog, (2009) was translated by Lisa C Hayden in 2019 for The Russian Library at Columbia University Press and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker, as was Khemlin's The Investigator (2012, translated by Melanie Moore for Glagoslav in 2015, see my review).  Information at Wikipedia about Khemlin is sketchy but it seems that her international profile blossomed in the post-Soviet era and reading these two novels confirms my opinion that Khemlin (1960-2015) was an outstanding author of subtlety and style.

Klotsvog, with its unprepossessing title, is subtitled Notes from the Jewish Underground but its portrayal of secular Jewish life is confined to the mental landscape of its central character, the narrator Maya. Like a Soviet version of Becky Sharp from Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847-8), Maya is on a quest to better herself.  In the Stalinist USSR, upgrading from cramped and overcrowded housing becomes an all-consuming quest for Maya who engineers successive relationships to achieve an apartment of her own by the novel's end.

Like Becky, Maya is shallow, selfish, manipulative and cruel, but unlike Becky, her motivation is not merely materialistic.  As noted in the Foreword by Lara Vapynya, Khemlin, the catalyst for her outrageous behaviour is fear.

Maya, like all the secular Jewish characters in her milieu, lost most of her family when they perished under the German Occupation of Ukraine during WW2.  She and her mother survived through 'the evacuation' (the mass migration of 16 million western Soviet citizens to the east) during the Soviet retreat.  They were among about 1.5 million East European Jews—mostly from Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia—who, in contrast to near annihilation of the Jews in the rest of German occupied Europe, survived behind the lines. Wikipedia tells us, however, that in the postwar era, Stalin reignited anti-Semitism, with campaigns against 'rootless cosmopolitans' (i.e. Zionists), among whom were writers and intellectuals arrested for 'espionage' and 'treason' beginning in 1948 and culminating with the Night of the Murdered Poets.

The surviving fragments of the Jewish community had good reason to fear a Soviet version of Hitler's Final Solution, and they were also haunted by the long history of pogroms in Ukraine, Poland and Russia. In the novel, Maya—who gradually becomes aware of how her suppressed Jewish identity impacts on her life—thinks that catastrophe is inevitable.  She determines to live as well as she can in the meantime.

My romantic infatuation with Viktor Pavlovich had overshadowed my thinking, leaving me with just enough awareness to think only of my love for him, especially since this was my first love. But the horrible assumptions hovering all around literally drove me into a corner and forced me to return, again and again, to the days in evacuation that had brought so many deprivations.

Of course, the problem of the future fate of the Jewish people—of which I was a constituent part due to my birth—rattled me.  But things were working out from that angle, too: I could live pleasantly and with dignity alongside a reliable person, at least for an allotted time, until new ordeals.  Be that as it may. (p.14)

Khemlin, as I said, is a subtle author, and Maya, as I said, is shallow. So with only occasional insights into Maya's mental landscape of fear, the novel romps through her energetic efforts to improve her lot while she awaits her fate.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/08/08/k...

[James Carmichael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thing is: it’s a complex and interesting book.

I didn’t like reading it; I didn’t like her, as most readers seem not to. But I also did not find her very interesting, with her tawdry self- and other-deceptions and ham-fisted materialistic machinations.

But even as I was feeling those things, and not enjoying it—wondering “why would I choose to spend time with this person?”—I was aware of a response in myself, an indication that even in this the book was realizing its richer, weirder, harder goal. It’s a rich, weird, hard book; at least, for me that’s what it is. It’s not about “embracing her for her whole humanity” or anything middle-brow sentimental like that; it’s also not about some harsh view of humanity: “we are all craven; this is a mirror unto yourselves.” I didn’t get either of those more familiar, more standard-scripted Big Messages from it. I’m not sure what I got, which is makes it compelling — and did, yes, make it more compelling to me as it went along, as it became clearer and clearer that we were trapped inside the mind and life of (to me) a person who was simultaneously herself trapped within structures of gender, ethnicity, and history; trapped within a social system that creates all sorts of twisted incentives and anti-humanistic behaviors; observing responses to that across the spectrum of wisdom and generosity (there are “decent” and well-reasoned acts in the book; just none by her, the person we spend all our time with)...it’s a mess, in what felt to me like a totally intentional function of its medium and content: this chatty internal monologue from a venal and unreliable narrator.

As it drew to a close, this rich sense of life winding together, of the choices we make coming to define us and create structures around us was profound. In her case, of course, almost totally negative; but somehow the illustration felt bigger than that — I, again, received it as a sort of effortless and inchoate but nonetheless yeah “profound” statement about those forces that I mentioned in the paragraph above, and how they trap and define individuals: society, gender, history, cruelty, appearance, government...all these really big things.

So I don’t know what to say. I did not “like” this book; I spent much of my time reading it unhappy I was. But I got “happier” (as it were), going on; and even from the start—when I was just feeling fully antagonistic to her and all her lies—it to me had a strong sense of intention and drive, of showing me this twig of a jerk of a person, who is herself (to me) neither “complex” nor that interesting, but who is so formed by...everything. And I felt that it looked at that “everything” in a complex and engrossing way, such that I can’t really describe it well (as you can tell; sorry) but that the melancholy experience of it will hang with me, not unpleasantly, for a long time.

[Theediscerning · Rating 3 out of 5]

With this one volume, this very academic imprint of Soviet and Russian writing shrinks the average age of the original publications they translate – this is much more modern than their routine output. As a result, it needs a little context for the ignorant browser and average reader such as I – why is the author looking back over these years in particular, and in the first person voice of someone who would now be in her eighties? As it is we get a mildly interesting tale of a woman who can't get hold of and keep what she wants – her first partnership doesn't prove up to much, but gives her a baby who is born when a different man is under her sheets as husband – although it's a third chap who brings the child up. With both offspring she ends up with she has to fend off comments about anti-Semitism they've picked up at school, for whether the scene be Kiev or Moscow, the post-War and post-Stalin sentiment is still against the family, and with the welter of patronyms available to them the kids are unaware they're also Jewish.

As I say, context is needed here. Did our author have more intent than just presenting a very naive floozy, a woman who can't remain monogamous to any household, it seems? Is this seemingly unreliable narrator supposed to be amusing, or is this the straight tragedy the guest foreword here would imply? For from the text alone such things didn't really stand out as having firm answers. The woman isn't completely likeable, and her repeated latching on to men as help-meets was not the most edifying plot out. It has been well presented – there is no doubt the translation provides for a certain chatty narration in keeping with the original Russian vernacular, even if not the multi-lingual aspects of the characters. As far as readability goes, it can seem a little woolly and over-long at times, but flows reasonably well, and is certainly easy enough to be consumed by the man on the stereotypical public transport. At the same time, though, the woman narrator has a particular quirk for closing many, many paragraphs and scenes, which suggests a more literary emphasis. As, ultimately, does the very much open to discussion subject of the book. In the end, I think it struggles to win the general reader over – unsavoury people in unsavoury times, and all that, but it's not really dislikeable.

[Translator Monkey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I struggled with this book. Looking back over other reviews, I find I am not alone. We all tend to either love, hate, or are ambivalent to the main character (the titular Maya Klotsvog) for a million different reasons. First, Margarita Khemlin is to be congratulated for creating one of the most complex characters I've read in my many years of devouring Russian fiction. Maya Klotsvog is a young Jewish woman living in post-WW2 Soviet Ukraine, who appears (through our reading, certainly not obvious through her narration) to be a scheming, cold (one might suggest heartless) woman who will do anything to sow discomfort within everyone around here, either directly or indirectly, including her own family members and other loved ones. So far, so good. But I'm not entirely convinced that's the case.

Look, I just finished reading this novel about 15 minutes ago, and I'm at a crossroads as to what I think the novel is truly about - the message, so to speak. I'm halfway convinced that the narration I read was a deliberate set of misdirections (we are dealing with an unreliable narrator, as we discover early on), created by Maya's protective veneer of self-preservation and her curious need to cushion those whose emotions she us most starkly disdainful towards. It's a curious ballet, but is it created by a cocktail of Maya's pre- and mid-War years and her family, which we are given scant glimpses of?

This is definitely worth another read or two, at least to me. I might have completely invented nuances that just aren't there, or I'm looking at a magnificent voice in post-War Russian literature. I hate reviews like this.

Two final words - First, it was refreshing to get what certainly must be a first-hand look at the political repression of the Ukrainian people that extended well into the 1970s. Second, the translation by Lisa Hayden is stunning, a work of art unto itself. Highly recommended.

Thanks to Columbia University Press for this ARC, through NetGalley, for my honest review.

[Peter Allum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oddly touching sly novel of an emotionally-repressed, self-deluding, manipulative woman.

Maya Abramovna Klotsvog, a Ukrainian Jewess, is forced to flee with her mother during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Her father is killed during the war and her home is razed. With her mother, she struggles to rebuild her life after the war, but is haunted by fears that Stalin will intensify his persecution of Jews, completing the holocaust.

The novel implies that a combination of wartime trauma and Stalinist terror warps Maya's personality, leaving her a selfish husk of a woman, dedicated to ensuring the survival of herself and, later, her son. She uses people in a blatant fashion, relying on her good looks, scheming skills, and blackmail. The sly aspect of the novel is that it is narrated by Maya, who is unable to see herself as anything other than a respectable, unfairly-treated model citizen. The huge gap between her malevolent actions and her self-image is tragicomic.

The novel tracks Maya's slow progress in shoring up her life through beneficial love affairs and marriages, acquisition of fine clothing, and progression to ever-better official housing. These gains come at the cost of poisoned relationships with her relatives, partners, and children.

The novel is highly original in its themes and manner of presentation. Interestingly, the author, Margarita Khemlin, does not directly confront the Soviet system under which she lived for the first 30 years of her life. Rather she writes about Nazism and Stalinist persecution from the perspective of the emotional damage it has inflicted on Maya Klotsvog and, through her, on others in her life. An archly sly novel in which considerable pain is hidden behind the comedy.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Khemlin (more properly, “Hemlin”) is yet another author who is mysteriously unknown in the UK and US. Yes, the cost of translation is a part of that, so hats off to Columbia University Press for the Russian book series of which this is a volume It’s a great snapshot of life in the post war USSR over the longue durée , and in particular the Jewish experience. This might lead you to think that the subject matter will be grim – and the book does start in the immediate aftermath of World War II with the main character expecting similar treatment for Jews from Stalin as the community suffered from Hitler. That didn’t materialise and it’s actually interesting to see Soviet life depicted in all its ordinariness over the next few decades. Not that Ms. Klotsvog is ordinary – she swaps hubbies at a rate that would shame anyone while she is devious and untrustworthy as a narrator – making for an at times outrageous read. The actions shifts around the USSR from Kyiv to Moscow to the Crimea and makes for a rattlingly entertaining and droll read.

[Arielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't really enjoy reading this book, although I found it interesting. As a descendent of holocaust survivors, I know something about Jewish life post WWII. However, this book offered a different POV -- the life of Jewish people after WWII that stayed in Russia.

Other than that, the main character was pretty much intolerable. For that reason the book was difficult for me to get through. I did try to understand the mindset of this traumatized population post WWII and how it affected their emotional stability and ability to be a parent. One thing that struck me was how Marik and Maya never spoke about their pasts before the war, which they acknowledged at one point. Therefore, I spent some time thinking about the evolution of the institution of marriage and whether or not that was representative of their situation or the time in general.

And also, I found the whole "but thats not my point" thing to get annoying. What was her point??

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book, a Jewish woman (who wishes to be anything/anyone else) living in Ukraine shortly after the War. She is perpetually unhappy, usually about the men in her life and her relationship with them. So she's not too happy with her son (who doesn't know who is biological father is) and her daughter from a different father. She is never happy, and it does get a little boring. But the interesting aspect of the book is the quite, hopefully unspoken (for her) fact of Jewishness; how do you get the son to stop speaking the Yiddish he's learned from his grandparents. How do you help the daughter live with being one of the few Jews in her class. The love life, or lack of it, gets kind of old.