American Ending

Mary Kay Zuravleff

Description

• Advance reader copies 
• Winter Institute (Seattle)
• ALA Chicago
• SIBA and NAIBA conferences 
• 5+ cities tour: Washington, DC, Baltimore, MD, Richmond, VA, Erie and Philadelphia, PA, Raleigh and Durham, NC
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A woman growing up in a family of Russian immigrants in the 1910s seeks a thoroughly American life.

Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who are building a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. However, Yelena craves a different path. Will she find her happy American ending or will a dreaded Russian ending be her fate?

In this immersive novel, Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga within the storied American landscape. The challenges facing immigrants—and the fragility of citizenship—are just as unsettling and surprising today as they were 100 years ago. American Ending is a poignant reminder that everything that is happening in America has already happened.

Sujets

• Historical
• Erie
• Appalachia
• Old Believers
• Erie, Pennsylvania
• Russian Orthodox Church
• Russian
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Blair
• Date de parution: 06 juin 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781958888001
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Advance Praise for American Ending
“Did Mary Kay Zuravleff time travel to write this book? It’s as if she truly lived in the past—all the details so vivid, and real—to bring us a novel of the moment. It is the old and forever new story of immigration. ”—Jane Hamilton, author of A Map of the World
“How I loved spending time with Yelena in her vivid, terrible, and—most astonishingly—joyous time and place. Mary Kay Zuravleff’s novel manages to capture all the struggle and the grief endured by this particular, unsung set of immigrants without ever veering into caricature or melodrama. Wholly fresh and achingly believable. ” —Alice McDermott, author of The Ninth Hour and Charming Billy
“ American Ending is an exhilarating new take on the great American immigration story. Mary Kay Zuravleff has given us a vivid, unforgettable portrait of an immigrant community and the wry, richly colored, and darkly enchanting stories it tells itself to survive.” —Margaret Talbot, staff writer for T he New Yorker
“In the dark of Pennsylvania’s coal mines, Yelena’s voice is both the light and the canary . Her struggles, and those of her Russian American immigrant community, are deeply felt and beautifully written. Immersive and compelling.”—Helen Simonson, author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
“ I fell in love with Yelena! So many stories of immigration focus on the men, but it’s the women who kept the family together, had the courage to leave their villages, who stuck it out in a strange land.” —Ana Menéndez, author of T he Apartment and Loving Che

American Ending
by
MARY KAY ZURAVLEFF
— BLAIR —
Copyright © 2023 by Mary Kay Zuravleff
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design by Laura Williams
Interior design by April Leidig
Blair is an imprint of Carolina Wren Press.

Th e mission of Blair/Carolina Wren Press is to seek out, nurture, and promote literary work by new and underrepresented writers.
We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of general operations by the Durham Arts Council’s United Arts Fund and the North Carolina Arts Council.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
This novel is a work of fiction. As in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience; however, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Zuravleff, Mary Kay, author.
Title: American ending / by Mary Kay Zuravleff.
Description: [Durham] : Blair, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022053428 (print) | LCCN 2022053429 (ebook) | ISBN 9781949467994 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781958888001 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3576.U54 A64 2022 (print) | LCC PS3576.U54 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022053428
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022053429
For my mother, my grandmothers, and yours
PART I
1908
1
I HOPED THE SISTERS I’d never met would never join us, and when they did arrive, I wanted to send them back—that’s how American I am. As far as I was concerned, my parents had left the two of them behind and come here to give birth to me. “What do you want, a medal?” my little brother used to ask. He was born here, but I was born first.
Where I was born isn’t how I was raised. Though I hailed from Marianna, Pennsylvania, I was brought up hearing that wolves talk and Old Believers rise from the dead. That a good woman can make soup from a stone, and a good man’s snot is black with coal dust. I’m American, so I figured I didn’t have to take what comes, the way Ma and Pa did. Our kind of Russian Orthodox is called Old Believers because they don’t believe in making changes—or choices—but I aimed to choose some things for myself. That included a life away from the mines, where most of the men who aren’t crushed or gassed end up dead from drink.
For years, I was at Ma’s apron strings, pickling beets and cucumbers alongside her, boiling diapers, rendering lard for soap. “Yelena, Yelena, Yelena,” she’d say, “What kind of mother leaves her daughters behind?”—a riddle where the answer was my kind of mother.
She didn’t leave the family icon behind, or prayer books her father had copied by hand, or spools of brocade to turn any shirt into a shirt fit for church. She even brought over a tin of ashes scooped from their tumbledown hearth, given that every family has a domovoi who lives in the stove, and better the devil you know.
A few plump raisins set out overnight and the domovoi would at most hide our slippers or let the fruit flies in. Ma warned us that a nibble of pride or envy would make a monster of him, as if I didn’t have enough to fret about. Surely, the domovoi would scorch what little food we had—or burn up our house with me in it—on account of my pride at being American and my envy of my older sisters, so treasured by Ma.
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.
I envied my sisters being pampered by the baba I’d never met, brushing the long wavy hair I admired in their picture, and our jeda, a tailor, sewing the matching coats that Baba described in her letters. I couldn’t bear Ma’s stories from when they were a family in Suwalki, roasting an entire pig over the coals for Easter dinner, decorating their fancy eggs, and eating Ma’s famous skansi and blintzes oozing sweet cheese. I didn’t want to hear about the three-day village wedding feasts when I went to bed hungry, cabbage and beans bloating me with gas, or potatoes and lard weighing me down like my baby sister’s leg, resting on my gut.
Each night, Ma uncoiled her braided bun and dropped hairpins in her lacquered box painted with Emilion and his magic pike. She shook out her golden plaits, never cut because that was a sin, and carried them like the train of a dress into our room, letting go so she could hoist our stack of covers. She tucked the heavy wool blanket beneath our chinnny chin chins and perched on our bed, careful not to sit on her hair. Rubbing her swelling belly, she asked, “Russian ending or American ending?”
Bedtime was the only time I felt sympathy for my big sisters, knowing that Ma and Pa had slipped away one day without them. It was hard to sleep stewing over that, and I worried that my parents might want to begin again, again. Every scrape I heard was the trunk being dragged from under their bed, every squeak the wagon carting them away from us.
That was a Russian ending, and Ma’s fairy tales were worse. For every wish come true, there was a catch, and you could easily end up worse off than where you started. She told us about the wolf who promised the bride a ride to her wedding if she climbed on his back, and instead, he ate her. “Eyelash to toenail,” Ma growled, tickling us three.
Kostia, flailing to escape, smacked baby Pearl, who sprayed tears like a watering can.
“Russian ending, everyone suffer,” Ma said and soothed our baby sister. “I’ll give you American ending for my tender American children.” She said “tender” the way the wolf might.
American ending meant the groom slicing open the wolf’s belly and the bride jumping out unharmed. Her baba skinned the wolf and used the pelt to line their firstborn’s cradle. “I heard it from the bride herself,” Ma said. “I danced at the wedding and I ate their soup.” She was proud of the cheery ending she’d tacked on.
Ma and Pa had come here to seek their fortune, and instead of Ma getting her girls back, she got me. Then Kostia, then Pearl, and now another one coming. She hadn’t seen her older daughters in ten years. I didn’t think we were suffering, but we weren’t tender either. Most days we kept Lent—Wednesdays, Fridays, saints’ days, and six weeks before Easter and Christmas—which meant no meat, milk, or eggs. Since we didn’t always have them otherwise, I figured some rules were made to turn hunger into holiness. Why else, and why so many rules? I’d dared to ask one night at supper.
“You want we should be New Old Believers?” Ma asked, then laughed at the impossibility of such a thing.
“Katya, what nonsense!” Pa scolded. He told me and Kostia to wipe the smiles off our faces. “Americanskiy,” he hissed.
Got that right, I’d thought, biting the inside of my cheeks to stop myself from grinning. Americans with their carnivals and crusted fruit pies, their mail-order catalogues and money-back guarantees. Americans not expecting the worst, so I wasn’t expecting it when he knocked me on the forehead with his spoon.
Russian ending or American ending? The wolf ate the bride either way. In Ma’s telling, the bride was cut free from the dead wolf’s belly and lived to tell the tale. Another night, I imagined, the bride might be spared, only to have a wolf eat her baby in the spring.
Ma touched her lips to my forehead, finally cool after a long bout of scarlet fever. “You’ll live,” she said and crossed herself. She took her leave, and each footfall across the creaking floorboards rattled the crooked window frames. At the top of our hill, winds got smacked around and whined through chinks in the bricks—or maybe it was someone’s ma. Our flimsy house shivered as if spooked. Lying like a body on top of me, the thick wool blanket weighted