Author Boris Fishman: Hold the humor for a moment.
The Unwanted
By Boris Fishman
Harper
330 pages
I forgot to laugh when I read Boris Fishman’s new novel about a family escaping civil war and totalitarianism.
Throughout The Unwanted, I read about a mother selling her body in exchange for her daughter’s escape to freedom. I held my breath as a family paid the last of their savings to bribe their way onto a boat headed out of a civil war and into a refugee camp. I wiped tears from my eyes — but they weren’t tears of laughter.
It turns out I wasn’t the only one who forgot to laugh. Fishman did too.
He also forgot — or, that is, intentionally chose — to leave out the names of the story’s country, ethnic tribes, and characters’ last names.
Humor and cultural specificity are trademark details of Fishman’s writing. Take, for example, his 2014 book A Replacement Life, in which a young fact-checker is enlisted to create fake Holocaust narratives for Russian-Jewish descendants of survivors seeking reparations for themselves: Hilarity ensues through the heaviness of identity-directed horror stories.
In his previous books, Fishman wrote specifically about his own family’s experiences, mining post-Soviet and Shoah stories. Fishman came to the U.S. as a child with his parents as they fled Soviet-era Belarus. His grandfather survived the Holocaust.
Fishman’s fresh writing approach in this novel, one of grave anonymity, is influenced by the weight of the current political moment. During an interview Tuesday on the date of the book’s release with WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven,” Fishman told me about how, with this latest story, he sought to articulate the universality of surviving authoritarian persecution.
“The book doubles as a plea to those people who live in the luxury of safety and security not to come to too easy conclusions about those people who try to flee their homelands because they feel profoundly unsafe,” the author said. “The choices you have in those situations sometimes don’t involve the luxury of doing the right thing or the legal thing. In portraying this in this novel, in a way, I’m avoiding sanctifying migrants and immigrants legal or illegal, but in another sense, I’m saying, ‘Hey, put yourself in their shoes.’”
In The Unwanted, Fishman borrows real-life details from the childhood experiences of a friend who fled Iran, not Eastern Europe, with her parents to escape religious persecution. She was named Dina Nayeri. The girl (then woman) at the center of The Unwanted is just called Dina, daughter of Susanna and George. The country itself in the story has no name. It’s clearly not Iran, for instance.
The three-part story follows 8‑year-old Dina and her parents as they seek to escape a war-torn country where fellow “minority sect” members keep getting imprisoned or murdered, after George’s position as a university professor becomes untenable; to navigate the daily illicit transactions and decisions about whom to trust in order to make it from a refugee camp to America; then, in Dina’s adulthood, to revisit the homeland to piece together the truth of those previous experiences and make one final escape.
Fishman, as usual, tells the story in fast-paced, suspenseful scenes that capture the indignities and deceptions that victims of injustice find themselves accepting or participating in so they can survive. Spouses tell each other lies; a refugee fatally lies to someone helping him escape; a mom sacrifices her body (and then her mind) so her daughter will live.
Fishman said he didn’t realize he hadn’t employed his typical, wacky sense of humor until writing was already underway: “I think it may be because I’d finally dug through enough of the soft tissue to get to the bone, and this book is the bone. And I hope there’s not much farther to go.”
Fishman’s second departure from past practice began at the start of the writing process. He decided not to title the country where his story takes place. He withheld the names of the “majority” and “minority” ethnic sects at war with one another. And he referred to his characters only by their first names. Fishman told me it was time to broaden the story to capture the totalitarian-survival experience by not limiting it to a particular nation’s or people’s story.
“Dina [Nayeri] and I are carbon copies of each other, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, our traumas are the same. Our hang ups are the same. Our dreams are the same. The things we look to for protection and inspiration are the same. We couldn’t have come from more different experiences,” Fishman said.
“What does that say? There’s something about this experience of disenfranchisement and attempts for survival that I think is universal, and that is ultimately the point I was trying to make. In some sense, it doesn’t matter what the country is, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Russia, perhaps even the United States, the people with the power — when they don’t protect the people without, it always work in the same way.”
Fishman’s lack of zaniness in no way holds back the story. Yes, humor is one way of helping to make a story feel universal. But it’s hardly the only way. Fishman is skilled at setting up parallel scenes that unfold simultaneously to keep us glued to the page (like whether young Dina will make it home from a neighborhood across town, and whether her mother will find her). He draws characters with enough guile or dishonesty but also grit, courage and compassion to make us care about them, most of all through Kamil, a nearly-killed revolutionary turned deluded and undemocratic but still idealistic leader.
On the other hand, Fishman’s commitment to obscuring place and time affects the story’s meaning more variably.
At a climactic moment in the novel, the anonymity of the country heightens Dina’s challenge in understanding it. Now 22 and on a return mission, she is being ferried to a life-or-death confrontation with the leader. At that moment, Fishman writes, she feels “that her homeland is a make-believe country.”
I’m not sure the decision to anonymize the ethnic groups and the country in question was necessary to universalize the points in the story. A good novelist — like Fishman — succeeds in doing that just by capturing the nuances and moral quandaries inherent in specific characters’ interactions. We can draw the lessons about human nature at large by reading about scamming Holocaust survivors or double-dealing endangered professors living in a specific ethnic battleground. Sometimes knowing a person’s name, tribe, nation, brings us more deeply into a story so that it becomes easier to grasp its broader take on the human condition. Sometimes anonymity (like “majority sect”) can interfere by calling attention to itself as a tool.
I found myself wanting to know more about the specific traditions and back stories of the characters and the nation and groups in The Unwanted, even as I had no doubt I was reading a broader tale about how persecutors and the persecuted both find themselves lying to themselves and others, how they continually retell stories, in order to continue living.
Another Soviet-born writer, Gary Shteyngart, took a different route toward the same goal in the novel Absurdistan: He made the nation fictional, but gave it a (funny) name. That helped us imagine a believable place on which to anchor an exploration of larger questions.
The Unwanted shows Dina continuing to pose such questions into adulthood, about her parents, about their escape, about her country.
That story has particular resonance for descendants of the adults who navigate those choices. Second and third-generation readers like so many of us Americans. And especially the next generation, like Fishman and real-life (and fictional) Dina.
“It’s the children who are usually the survivors. It is for them that the parents and the grandparents sacrifice. They sometimes perish as a result of their efforts,” Fishman reflected in the radio interview. “It is up to us to try to make sense of what they did and to honor their sacrifices. But it’s a very morally ambivalent experience as we learn about what they did … and answer for ourselves the question of, ‘Well, how do we live now? How do we honor them, but also live morally at the same time?’ ”
Like the characters in his novels, Fishman is continually telling and retelling a story — his own story — in new ways. He grapples with the story to process trauma but also to understand it (and our world) better by removing one set of blinders after another.
Click on the video below to watch the full conversation with author Boris Fishman on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”