American Ending

April 24, 2023
Zuravleff’s meticulous latest (after Man Alive!) follows a family of Russian immigrants as they acclimate to life in early 1900s Pennsylvania. Yelena Federoff, the first of her family to be born in the U.S., is proud of her status but is secretly jealous of her elder two sisters who were left behind in Russia when Yelena’s father immigrated to find work in the dangerous coal mines. Yelena helps to raise her younger siblings and attends a strict Russian Orthodox church, while her generous mother feeds whomever she can and houses old friends from Russia until they can get on their feet. There are moments of joy—a Thanksgiving feast, the arrival of Yelena’s two older sisters—but a disaster at the mine brings tragedy to the community. As Yelena comes of age and looks on as her family and neighbors stumble through a series of weddings and births (all with copious amounts of vodka), she begins to question whether this is the life for her. Zuravleff richly describes the hardscrabble setting, capturing the horrific working conditions, her characters’ will to provide for their families, and how all of it is stifling to Yelena. Fans of 20th-century immigrant stories ought to take a look.

June 15, 2023
In early 20th-century mining country, a tough little girl digs herself out of a life without choices. "The Pittsburg-Buffalo Company supplied Pa with a single ticket to come to Marianna in 1898, and selling all they could, floorboards to doorknobs, only raised enough for one more ticket. If Pa came alone, he wouldn't get a house; if Ma came with him, they'd have to leave the girls behind. So Baba made up a room in their house for her precious granddaughters, and Ma and Pa promised to send for them within a year. But instead of getting their two girls back, they got me, their first American, on January 31, 1899." Yelena Federoff is a born storyteller, raised on folktales with "Russian endings," which are the sort where the wolf eats the bride "eyelash to toenail." This little girl, who is pulled out of school to take care of babies and help keep house before she gets to sixth grade, learns early that real life offers few American endings, where the bride hops out unharmed. Zuravleff's tale follows Yelena to the age of 20, by which point she has made a few decisions of her own despite the 1908 mining disaster, problematic immigration laws, the Spanish flu epidemic, the reactionary culture of the Old Believers of the Russian Orthodox Church, and plenty of "Foolish Questions," a long-running real-life newspaper feature with sarcastic answers to stupid queries. All of this is so thoroughly kneaded into the story you won't stop to wonder at the research that yeasted this novel until you finish it. In Yelena's voice, sprinkled with Russian words and early-20th-century idioms, a whole world comes steaming to life: the horrors of the mine, the closeness of the ethnic neighborhoods surrounding it, the babble of the schoolhouse, the smells of the kitchen, and so much more. When her little brother invents a cage with an air tank attached, so that a canary can do its job in the mine without having to die for it, it seems a metaphor for the love that kept these immigrant families going through the hardest of hardscrabble times. The narrator's voice and her story are so unusually vivid it feels like Zuravleff is channeling a real person.

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