Trio of Russian women mull fate, free will

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/05/2022 (1243 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For Massachusetts-based author Rachel Barenbaum (A Bend in the Stars), it’s clear that science is also political, and history also personal. The intermixing of literary and genre fiction conventions suggests she also considers bookseller categories to be entirely fictional.

Barenbaum’s thoughtful, emotionally grounded second novel follows the interrelated stories of three generations of women: one born into the Russian Revolution, another smuggled out of Stalin’s Soviet Union only to spend her childhood as an illegal immigrant in McCarthy-era America and a third raised in a Russian-American drug den.

All three generations must hide their Jewish heritage to varying extents depending on the context. All three must navigate misogyny in multiple forms and contexts. Each generation of this family has a traumatic beginning; each generation reveals a certain potential for greatness, if marred by one fateful error or another.

If Barenbaum wanted to write a classical family saga, the bones are certainly there. She establishes a clear multi-generational throughline both for the centrally placed Berkova family and the troubled history of 20th-century Russia that looms so large over their lives. With the complex characters she’s developed, the author could keep the reader guessing to the very end whether any generation of this family will escape self-destruction or not.

But this line of women undertake actions that reverberate not only into the future but also into the past, as Baba Anna, Chief Engineer of the Soviet nuclear weapons program and later Chernobyl reactor, has also invented an atomic-powered time machine (albeit one that kills its user a little more with each jump).

This adds new dimensions to the core questions of the novel: What are the limits of individual will in overcoming massive historical forces and deep-rooted intergenerational trauma? How much weight should be given to, respectively, the long “arc of bad decisions” in a person’s life versus those singular crucial mistakes, the sort that a brief jump through time might avert?

This is a new and interesting twist on the question that so frequently comes up in time travel stories: fate versus free will. But it’s also a question of human nature: are our deepest psychic flaws poised to shatter our lives, or can we grow beyond these cracks, become whole?

Berenbaum’s previous novel was set on the Russian front during the First World War, so she is practiced at historical research, which is critical here. It wouldn’t be possible to get a clear sense of what it means to be a Jewish Soviet woman, either behind or outside of the Iron Curtain, if the reader wasn’t also given a believable picture of what these places and eras were actually like for the people living there.

The plot device of Atomic Anna, a comic book series written by Molly about her long-lost mother, herself and, later, her own daughter, is reminiscent of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, in which Jewish refugees to the U.S. in 1939 create an anti-Nazi comic book superhero. Barenbaum spends less time on her superheroes, but they provide a connection between the three generations of women, who for so much of the novel are separated from each other.

This is a novel long on ideas and a moderately sized cast of characters, but no one is left behind and the threads are connected expertly by the end. The story is not strictly linear, but the narrative progression is logical and easily pulls the reader along, without telegraphing the ending. It’s a strong sophomore effort from a writer we have surely not heard the last of.

Joel Boyce is a Winnipeg writer and educator.