Review: 'There are Jews in My House' gives voice to youth

FICTION

There are Jews in My House

By: Lara Vapnyar. Publisher: Pantheon, 154 pages, $17.95. Review: In these stories set in Moscow and Brooklyn, Vapnyar masters the difficult art of capturing a young person's perspective without seeming false or precious.

Reviewed by Cherie Parker

Special to the Star Tribune

With stealthily engrossing, graceful prose, Russian immigrant Lara Vapnyar has crafted this collection of stories -- each complete and satisfying on its own -- into a clear-eyed rumination on the tenuous simplicity of youth.

Each story presents different times, people and places, yet Vapnyar's delicate touch with the realities of human interaction is a constant. And she sets her scenes with a learned poise. Vapnyar, a native Russian speaker who began learning English only about 10 years ago, neither pours on ham-handed descriptions nor scrimps on important details. Her stories are at once engaging and thought-provoking. She has a special sense of how children closely observe events around them, but only divine their implications much later.

The first story, "There Are Jews in My House," one of two told from a young-adult point of view, manages to imbue a strangely believable childishness in its very mature situation.

Galina is a young mother in a Nazi-occupied Russian town who hides a Jewish friend and her daughter while both women's husbands are away as soldiers. Once charmed by Raya's relatively open and sensual way of living, Galina becomes increasingly irritated and resentful in their close confinement and fantasizes about in turning her friend.

"Love Lessons -- Mondays, 9 a.m." posits the intriguing question: What if a sex-education teacher has never had sex? An 18-year-old teaching student in Moscow has been rushed into service due to a shortage of high-school instructors. When she is chosen to teach sex ed, she tries to augment the clinical tone of her scholarly manual with hilariously off-base information from her oft-drunk aunt. She is at first terrorized by her assignment, but soon the reflected sexuality of her material makes her attractive to her male colleagues and she finds herself acquiring wisdom from legitimate experience.

The rest of the stories are told from the point of view of children. "Ovrashki's Trains" is a brief mood piece featuring a 5-year-old at her family's summerhouse who is unaware of a sudden shift in the family's reality. "Lydia's Grove," a more substantial meditation, gives a child's-eye view of the desperation and heartache of a middle-age lesbian love triangle in a repressed country. "A Question for Vera" combines anti-Semitism with casual childhood cruelty. "Mistress" finds 9-year-old Misha serving as an interpreter for his grandmother in his family's new, close-quartered life in Brooklyn. In this intimate environment, Misha becomes privy to his grandfather's secret life.

"There Are Jews in My House" was originally written in English, although Vapnyar moved to New York from Russia in 1994 and taught herself English only after her arrival -- reportedly with the help of television and Jane Austen. All of Vapnyar's characters are Russian, but the subtle heartaches and quiet frustrations they suffer are universal. This lovely collection very effectively captures the small moments that tell what it means to be human.