Escape to Purgatory

In Rome during the sultry summer of 1978, a small boy is waiting with his mother along with scores of Russian-Jewish émigrés in the office of the Joint Distribution Committee. At his mother’s urging, he stands up formally to recite from memory a poem he had learned at his elite kindergarten in Leningrad:

When Lenin was littleWith a head of boyish curlsHe also gamboled happilyUpon the snowy hillsStone upon stoneBrick upon brickGone is our Lenin, Vladimir IllichDeep in the KremlinA kind heart residesSad are the workersSad too am I.

As a symbol of the uselessness of the knowledge, experience and behaviour that the émigré characters bring with them from the USSR in David Bezmozgis’s first novel—as well as an example of the author’s sly humour—this scene could not be better. It alerts the reader...