Short-form interview with Olga Zilberbourg
by Odette Heideman
(portrait by Kendra Allenby)
Like Water is not a traditional novel, but it reads like a novel in a way, with the immigrant condition as a sort of blanketing narrative. Looking at Like Water as a whole, the immigrant-in-a-new-world is an archetypal character—male, female, young, old—all encompassed in one larger character. Did you sort through stories you had to find the ones that feel this connection? How did it come together?
Thank you for characterizing the book as a non-traditional novel! This is precisely the effect I was going for. My training is in comparative literature, and I’ve done some work in narrative theory. As a reader, I am always conscious about the way I look beyond the characters and the narrators of a book, searching for the consciousness of the implied author to guide my reading experience. Who is that person structuring the information on the page? What can I tell about her politics, about her ethical values, about the strengths and the limitations of her factual knowledge? These questions inform my analysis and appreciation of the text.
As a writer, when I’m structuring a collection of stories, I make an assumption that, like me, my readers are interested in the human being who shows up most fully in the white spaces between one’s story ending and another’s beginning. From the information on the cover alone, my reader knows that I’m a woman, that I grew up in the Soviet Union, and that I live in the US and I write in English. So, yes, nearly automatically, my story is framed as an immigrant’s story. Then comes the interesting part.
People have certain expectations about what themes an immigrant’s story might hold. I try to honor their expectations, and offer the readers something else, too—something that goes beyond the labels. “Rubicon” is one of the last stories I wrote for this collection, but I decided to put it first, because it features an immigrant protagonist, reflecting on her feelings as an outsider. Then, I braid in other themes. “Her Left Side,” the second story, features an immigrant character who is an expectant mother. Later, I add stories about a mother’s anxieties about her child’s health; anxieties about work life; a thread comes in where characters question their sexuality and gender identity. The protagonists of these stories are different. But there’s enough overlap in the themes that a reader can use each fiction as a building block for the portrait of the implied author.
The pace of these stories—perhaps because we read them at a fast clip—is quick, with no lingering. What was the pace of writing? Did they come out whole, or was it a more labored process?
I’m glad to hear that the stories feel fast-paced. Writing-wise, I have a pretty laborious process that involves workshopping and revising these pieces at least three times before I send them out to magazines. “Rubicon,” the first story in the collection was one of the quickest to get onto the printed page. A car cut me off as I was crossing the street, and the driver—I could see him and he could see me—reminded me of a boy I knew in high school. He had this posture, so upright, projecting his pride in himself, in his ability to be swifter than me. It made me think of how, as adults, we never really stop being the cruel children we once were. The next day, I wrote the story. I workshopped it once, and then decided to include in the manuscript that I was sending out.
The story that appeared in Epiphany some years ago (“The Green Light of Dawn”) is one of my favorite stories that we’ve published. It was quite a long story, whereas these are compact and at times even flash fiction length. Another funny story, “Dandelion,” discusses the expectations that a writer will write a novel. Was there a reason for the brevity here, or does it just feel right? Do you intend to stick to short stories, or do you have a novel in the works?
The lengths of the stories in this collection vary widely. The brief stories are so for different reasons. For instance, “Evasion”—a story that began with a high-concept idea: what if humans never stopped growing?—could’ve been a novel or a screenplay. I generate a lot of novel ideas—a novel idea a day!—and instead of putting them in a drawer, turn them into flash fictions.
Then, there are pieces like “Clock,” which is a fairly traditional short story, though I do a lot of summarizing to compress twenty-something years into a page and a half. I zero in on a particular object in a particular setting and I have two characters, a grandmother and a granddaughter, living side by side with each other and failing to connect. I have list stories, and a prose poem, and stories that grew out of social media posts that document a very immediate experience. Not all of these stories are meant to stand alone. Many depend on the context of being read as a part of the collection.
At the moment, I’m moving in the direction of personal essays—perhaps, a memoir in stories. Something along the lines of Etgar Keret’s The Seven Good Years, though perhaps less formally structured. And yes, since I keep generating novel ideas, too, maybe one day, I’ll come across a novel idea that will match my ability and inspire me enough to actually execute.
So many of these read the way people think when they are living, as opposed to thinking, in an intellectual sense: one idea triggers the thought of another. How do you find your way into a story?
In many of the stories for this collection, I gave myself the permission to explore the logic—some people might say illogic—of anxiety. I had never thought of myself as a particularly anxious person until my kids were born. It was shocking, actually, to encounter my own fears and to feel the loss of control that comes with the newborns, the unpredictability of their schedule, of their rapidly changing needs. Later in their childhood, a minor playground incident could lead to a tidal wave of overwhelming thoughts, and my usual methods of coping—for instance, talking out problems with my (non-Russian-speaking) husband and my friends—didn’t work. My anxieties were not their anxieties, and describing the events alone wasn’t sufficient in showing them what, exactly, seemed so scary to me.
Eventually I found a therapist who allowed me the space to air my anxieties, and I found joy in exchanging WhatsApp voice messages with my cousin and fellow new mother in Russia, but I also took this disconnect between me and my local friends as a creative challenge. Anxieties are yet another space in the mind where one’s cultural background and life experiences play out. On the page, in writing, I have all kinds of tools to explore the way cultural disconnect amplifies anxieties and anxiety-related behaviors.
Quite a few of these stories deal with the bubble of a relationship that one has with one’s child, in fact. In “Companionship” a three year old actually climbs back into his mother’s womb. Did this theme develop after you had kids or was it alive and well beforehand?
The parent-child relationship has been one of the themes I’ve been exploring from the very beginning of my writing career. Becoming a parent myself has definitely given me a different perspective on this relationship, has helped me to gain nuance. I think the conventional wisdom about the relationship between parents and children is that parents raise the child and teach her about the ways of the world. It was only after I became a parent that I started to understand just how reciprocal that relationship is. Not only have I learned a ton about myself through the experience of having children, but I also have expanded my world by welcoming their interests into it, and their friends, the TV shows they watch, the books they read. My son goes to preschool where they emphasize social-emotional learning. This certainly wasn’t part of my schooling in the Soviet Union. This seems strange for a writer to admit, but I have never known what to do with emotions. In writing, I have found clever ways of circumventing writing emotions, but I’ve never really been able to approach them directly. At five, my son is already so much better at identifying his own feelings and accepting the feelings of others than I have ever been. I’m reveling in the opportunity to learn alongside him.
There seems to be no judgment by the narrators in this collection. They are as honest as one can be, which brings a sort of intimacy to the work. Was this a conscious choice?
I am very interested in writing about those moments when people judge each other, exploring how people’s judgments of others reflect on their own character and understanding. For example, in “A Bear’s Tune,” I show two characters in a relationship that’s on the verge of breaking up. Masha is a transplant from Russia who expresses her dislike of her girlfriend Abby’s American family at the time when Abby very much needs her support. The story is an extended description of a fight they get into, during which Masha’s being cruel, and Abby’s deciding whether to resist this cruelty or to let it go. Both of them are really deciding the people they want to be to each other and to themselves.
I tell the story from Masha’s point of view, but I make sure to tell the reader enough about Abby’s background and to provide enough of her own voice, in direct quotation, for a more complete picture of Abby, not limited to Masha’s perspective. I also consider the fact that my non-Russian readers will probably naturally relate more to Abby’s side of the story than to Masha’s, and so they will identify with her despite the fact that Masha is my point of view character. My Russian-speaking readers are more likely to understand Masha better, and possibly to forgive her cruelty—I think I would, but I don’t want Abby to forgive Masha. I side with Masha, but I can also see the way she’s really floundering in her life and relationships, and I can see how she’s toxic for Abby.
I was interested in the way the stories in Like Water wear down a path back and forth between St. Petersburg and San Francisco. It seems like a metaphor for your life. You’ve had three books published in Russian. Have those been translated into English? Are you an exophone, or do you still write in Russian, from time to time?
My parents live in Petersburg, so, yes, I do go back and forth. I used to go a lot more often before the kids were born; now I rely on my parents to come to San Francisco more often. With language, however, I use Russian a lot more than I did before the kids were born. I speak to the kids in Russian, and have been trying to build a Russian-speaking community around them. As a writer, I work mostly in English, but occasionally I do write in Russian. I have different strengths and weaknesses in the two languages. I’m more confident about my English, but I actually have a better sense of narrativity when I follow the Russian.
I’ve written most of these books in English and then worked with friends and family members who helped me translate my work back to Russian. I wrote a large part of my second Russian book, The Keys to the Lost House, in Russian, during the summer I spent in St. Petersburg in 2007, and I haven’t translated those stories to English. I find translating my own work impossible—I start rewriting, rethinking each piece in a different language environment.
This transposing of cultures is fascinating: what is ‘normal’ in our culture is not in theirs. The line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ blurs—disappears, even—when one identifies as both ‘us’ and ‘them.’ In a way these stories are an illustration of those caught in-between. Do you view this as a struggle or a perquisite?
I would love to live in a world that affirms and delights in difference, where multiple identities are a perquisite. I relish the idea that my stories might contribute, in some ways, to bring that reality about. But I have to admit that, so far, I’ve been struggling against what I’ve perceived as an erasure of cultural experiences, of wanting to tell my stories to combat the invisibility that I feel.
I grew up in a Jewish family in the Soviet Union, where Jewish identity was constructed in racial terms, similarly to the way being Jewish was constructed in opposition to the Aryan race in Nazi Germany. I was a Jew because I’d been born to Jewish parents and “Jewish” was the label attached to me in my passport. Moving to the United States, I learned how differently Jewish identity was constructed here. People hear my accent and ask me if I’m Russian—a label that I resist, because it erases the story of my family. To be Russian in the US is to be identified with Russian imperial culture, ballet, Faberge eggs, onion-dome churches, and the rest. My family came from the shtetls in Eastern Europe. They came to Leningrad after the revolution, when the pale of settlement was abolished. Their dream was to attain the economic and educational opportunities that the capital followed and to be treated on equal terms. But not to pass for Russian.
Many post-Soviet people share the Russian language—people from Central Asian countries, from the Caucasus mountains, from the Soviet parts of Mongolia. I’ve been looking to writers these communities, in addition to the post-Soviet Jewish community, for models of how to combine multiple cultural identities.
About her seminal book, Tropisms, Nathalie Sarraute wrote, “One had to take hold of the instant, by enlarging it, developing it.” She shunned the idea of the narrative that depends on plot and character, and focused instead on “movements that are hidden under the commonplace, harmless instances of our everyday lives.” In other words, the experience of an emotion, rather than the details of it as it relates to a larger story. That feels of apiece with Like Water. Which writers have been of the greatest influence to you?
I love this connection. Nathalie Sarraute has been on my list since grad school, but I haven’t yet read her work. I have to credit my comparative literature program for profoundly influencing my development as a writer and as a human being. I discovered authors as different from one another as Christa Wolf, Toni Morrison, Clarice Lispector, Ursula Le Guin. I also had a chance to reexamine my Russian-language literary heritage and to reengage with the work of Anton Chekhov. Lydia Chukovskaya, best known in English for her novella Sofia Petrovna and for her diaries about Anna Akhmatova, is another important author for me.
What are you reading now?
I’ve just finished Lisa C. Hayden’s marvelous translation of Klotsvog, a novel by a post-Soviet Jewish writer Margarita Khemlin, and James Schulyer’s What’s for Dinner?, published by NYRB Classics, a press that I follow. Next on my list are books I’ve picked up at the Art of the Short Fiction panel during San Francisco’s Litquake: Mimi Lok’s Last of Her Name, Keenan Norris’s By the Lemon Tree, and Beth Piatote’s The Beadworkers. I have a separate Russian-language reading list going, and I’m particularly excited about a new biography of Lilya Brik penned by Alisa Ganieva. I’m reading that in parallel with the novel by Lilya’s sister, Elsa Triolet, Roses à credit—Elsa lived in France and wrote in French, and was the first woman to be awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1944. I’m reading this book in the Russian translation.
A graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology, Olga Zilberbourg is the author of the short story collection Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press), as well as three Russian-language books (the latest of which “Хлоп-страна,” Издательство Время, 2016). She has published fiction and essays in Alaska Quarterly Review, Scoundrel Time, Narrative Magazine, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She co-moderates the San Francisco Writers Workshop.
