Moving beyond the Russian- American Ghetto: The Fiction of Keith Gessen and Michael Idov ADRIAN WANNER “R ussian-American” fiction written in English, mainly by Soviet-born Jews, has enjoyed an unprecedented boom in recent years. In the wake of Gary Shteyngart’s bestselling novel The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002), there has been a proliferation of Russian immigrant writing on the American literary scene. 1 At the same time, a certain weariness has settled in among some of the providers of these Russian-American narratives. While these authors have benefitted from the appeal of ethnic and multicultural products on the U.S. literary market, they also risk being trapped in an “exotic” niche and becoming purveyors of predictable plots. As Morris Dickstein has noted, “immigrant writers all run the risk of telling the same story about their coming of age, their sense of estrangement and cultural displacement, the ordeal of language, the conflicts between generations, and their need for acknowledgment within their new world.” 2 Fearful of falling prey to a repetitious and shopworn routine, several of these writers have indicated plans to move away from ethnic and Russian immigrant themes in their future work. 3 Of course, such concerns are by no means unique to Russian Jews— they constitute a general dilemma of immigrant writing. “Ethnic novels,” as Thomas Ferraro has observed, “have long been considered the poor stepsisters of a benighted realist family: stereotypical in plot and characterization, assimilationist in drive, contestable even as social evidence, and of interest only to group members and historians.” 4 Mindful of these pitfalls, Asian-American writers have been 1 For a survey, see Adrian Wanner, Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Evanston, 2011), 95–187. See also the special forum devoted to Russian-American fiction in Slavic and East European Journal 55 (Spring 2011). 2 Morris Dickstein, “Questions of Identity: The New World of the Immigrant Writer,” in The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, (Bloomington, IN, 2008), 129–30. 3 At a reading at Tufts University in April 2012, Shteyngart announced that his next novel would have nothing to do whatsoever with Russian immigrant topics. He also admitted, however, that he had no idea what this book would be about, and he asked the audience for suggestions. 4 Thomas J. Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago, 1993), 1. The Russian Review 73 (April 2014): 281–96 Copyright 2014 The Russian Review