Professor and memoirist Shrayer (Waiting for America
) delivers eight deliberate stories about educated, accomplished Russians who have uneasily settled in America. Many of these tales viscerally reveal the inability to shed one’s past, as in “Sonetchka,” named for the upwardly mobile émigrée protagonist who has attained financial success but has left her Russian husband, Igor, to fall into drunkenness, despair and, possibly, vengeance against her. “The Afterlove” is a recollection of postwar first love conjured by Pavel Lidin, who encountered a mermaid at a summer lake camp when he was 13 and later married his best friend’s pregnant girlfriend. In two stories, the Jewish Russian protagonist endures a breakup with a gentile woman: in “The Disappearance of Zalman,” Mark loses his girlfriend once she meets his yeshiva tutor and is smitten by his “passionate” Jewish nature, while in the title story, a businessman in Amsterdam, feeling guilty for having told his fiancée that he wants a Jewish wife, finds atonement in the city of easy morals. The stories are competently written and soundly constructed, though readers may feel they’ve read them before. (Oct.)
