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Panic in a Suitcase

The novel of immigration may be one of the most typical genres in American literature, but there are far fewer portrayals of return to the homeland. Of course, return was inconceivable for émigrés from the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, but the fall of the Iron Curtain allowed a new generation of writers to contrast the absurdities of life in exile with the equally bizarre experience of post-socialist transition. While the Nasmertov family in Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s Panic in a Suitcase lives in New York, their native Odessa is constantly present. This is quite natural, considering that the central character decides to stay there: “Ties hadn’t been severed; Odessa remained theirs. This sense of retention, of not having exchanged or betrayed but simply enlarged in scope, kept virulent immigrant manias at bay” (128). Looking over the Black Sea toward the Balkans and Turkey, Odessa was Russia’s historical window to the south and had a legendary (though now faded) tradition of vibrant multiculturalism, but, like its Austrian counterpart, Trieste (now Italian), it has become relatively isolated and provincial after being cut off from a larger cultural context. Panic in a Suitcase brings this city with its unique role in Russian-Jewish literature (including such writers as Isaac Babel and Ilya Ilf) into contemporary American fiction. Pasha (Pavel) Nasmertov is supposedly one of the great contemporary Jewish poets of Odessa, yet this title is deceptive: he has abandoned his Jewishness by converting to Orthodoxy, and his Odessaness remains dubious, because he was actually born in Chernivtsi: “The Odessa poets felt that he was making use of the city without paying the obligatory dues. He could have renounced his claim on the city; instead he felt the opposite pull, to out-Odessa them all” (93). Along with Pasha, the Nasmertov family includes Pasha’s parents Robert and Esther, his sister Marina and her husband Levik, their daughter Frida, and Pasha’s two wives in Odessa, Nadia and Svetlana. In Part 1 of the novel, set in Brighton Beach in 1993, Pasha’s hapless attempt to navigate American culture (he is once left literally floating in the middle of a lake without an oar), ends in his decision to return home. Part Two, which takes place 15 years later, features another return: Pasha’s niece Frida (who was born in Odessa but scarcely remembers it) decides to go back for her cousin’s wedding, and is given the task of visiting the family’s beloved dacha. The first chapter is a wry description of the family’s attempts to reenact their seaside rituals from the old country: