Read an excerpt.
Both a collection of short stories and a novel, its covers hold stories of individuals, each different from the other, particular, strongly flavored. And yet the stories add up to a novel about one culture crash landing into another, the recipient culture unaware and indifferent to the accident. But the expectations, hopes, and illusions of the entrants crack at contact, some bursting into flames; many of the immigrants quickly and desperately wishing to go back “home.”
The travelers were Russian Jews, successful professionals in the country of their birth who took their leap for reasons that aren’t ever clear. Is it to escape a restrictive government, chronic anti-Semitism, an anticipation of worse in Russia to come, or belief that the U.S. has a superabundance of dollars ripe for the plucking?
Pittsburgh, the site of their crash landing, or spot they soon crawled to, had no professional jobs for them, only few, sporadic jobs of a poorly paid, low status, service sort—care taking, janitorial, and other such.
Language loomed a barrier to efforts to improve their situation, for some an almost insurmountable barrier. In America, though they are trying to learn English, they are most comfortable and most often speaking Russian.
Most of the immigrants arrived as families—parents and children, siblings, cousins, huddling in Squirrel Hill, creating something very like a ghetto blocked by invisible but almost impenetrable walls.
Failure, rage, depression eats at family affection and bonds. Everyone seems to demand too much; no one is capable or willing to give enough.
The novel deals with this culture unraveling under stress and these people’s attempts to build a hybrid, functioning culture in this strange land, America. Litman shows glimpses of individual endeavors without abstracting the process, which can only be obtained by the readers’ epiphanies and slowly accumulating understanding.
The stories are of individuals, their each one’s unique response to the common dilemma.
My favorite character is the teenager Masta, who is as close to protagonist as the novel owns. Torn, unconsenting from her home in Russia, where she had a promising future, she struggles to make a place for herself, despite her failures in Pittsburgh’s schools, her growing antagonism to her parents, her fumbling attempts to manage newly sprung sexual needs, and muddling work performance. Masta combats her difficulties without the shield of delusion. She is clear-eyes about those she loves and her own, often flinching and desperate attempts to make a life for herself. But flinch though she does, she’s no quitter. Again and again she throws herself into new opportunities. And when moments of comfort an joy come she has the ability to throw aside resentment and embrace them.
Litman’s older and old people demonstrate time’s stiffening of flexibility. Their successes are slow-coming and few; their failures many; some are wonderfully cranky, some pulled under by depression.
One critic called Litman’s prose luminous. I call it sturdy and serviceable. Here’s a taste for you to judge:
This is our everyday route. Me at the wheel, my dad in the passenger seat. We start at Wendover Street—it’s where we live. I adjust the mirrors the way he tells me to. To my left, the road. To my right, the curb, littered with tilted garbage cans. The sidewalk and five almost identical apartment buildings, brick with tarnished trimming. There’s one with all the crazies: at night they come out, sleepwalking and howling. Joe Berman, who lives across the street, says they give him nightmares. Joe studies for his Ph.D in Russian. Some nights, I see him sitting outside in his Tercel, listening to the songs by Vertibnsky: I am madly afraid of your shimmery shackles. Sometimes I sit with him and translate.
AND
Sweryoza and Olya miss the bus. First they miss the one that stops at the corner of Phillips and Murray, in front of the hardware store. It shows up early and passes without pausing—no potential passengers in sight. Seryozha and Olya see it as they round the corner.
“See? Unreliable,” says Seryozha. “Cabs and buses, all unreliable, but buses especially so.”
Adept at both first person and third person, she conveys the impression of broken English without making an obstacle of it.
It’s her characterization that is luminous. She’s clear-eyed, unsentimental, and very affectionate in capturing her characters on paper. What impressed me most was how much of her characters’ behavior I had seen among my own non-immigrant, typically American friends.
The Last Chicken in America provokes thought, refusing to be dislodged from memory, despite my dyslexic breakdowns with the Russian names. My largest and rather surprising inference is how humanness withstands cultural washing. Reading this collection is often like looking in a mirror.
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