Book reviewed: All Russians Love Birch Trees by Olga Grjasnowa (originally published in Sept 2022)

Rootlessness is one of the defining themes of our age, and Olga Grjasnowa is well positioned to write about it. She was born in 1984 in what was then the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. When the Red Empire imploded, Grjasnowa found herself living in a new country virtually overnight, without so much as having changed postal codes. In the mid-1990s, her family transplanted itself to Germany, and Grjasnowa found herself in a new country once again, though this time both the move and, I imagine, the ensuing culture shock were very real. This experience is at the heart of Grjasnowa’s debut novel All Russians Love Birch Trees, published in 2012.

The story is narrated in the first-person singular by Maria Kogan. Like the author, Maria was born into a Russian-speaking family in Baku. Also like the author, she has called Germany home for years, though the reader quickly learns it’s hard to call Germany home if you’re not an ethnic German. Still, Maria is as well integrated as her adopted country allows her to be, and she is studying to become a professional translator. When her boyfriend Elias succumbs to a nosocomial infection following an accident, Maria’s world is turned upside down. To recover from the trauma, Maria travels to Israel, where she wades through a conflict-ridden terrain while struggling to maintain her own mental equilibrium.

The English translation of the title is only an approximation of the original. The German Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt means “the Russian is one who loves birch trees,” the corollary of which is that those who don’t love birch trees cannot be Russian — an absurd generalization that exemplifies the identity straightjacket someone is always trying to put on Maria. The problem is not that she is perpetually the victim of stereotypes, but that the stereotypes always miss their target. That is the tragicomic predicament of her life: Maria is not only a foreigner in Germany, she is a foreigner everywhere. As a Russian-speaking Jew in Baku, she is a stranger among the majority Azeri population. Although she is a native Russian speaker, her Jewishness is bound to get in the way of her complete identification with, and perhaps acceptance by, ethnic Russians. In Germany she is never allowed to forget she is an Ausländerin and, one suspects early on, she won’t be considered sufficiently Jewish in Israel if her maternal lineage isn’t kosher enough. No irregularities there, as it turns out, yet Maria is still forced to confront the question of her identity just moments after landing in Tel Aviv. Anatomy is destiny, Freud said; as the 20th century showed, so is ethnicity.

Maria, then, is doubly miscast — first as the butt of stereotypes, then as someone who can never live up to the stereotypes of which she is the butt. When she confesses, “To me, the term homeland always implied pogrom,” this can be understood in an ontological sense. There is simply no way out of this situation, and Maria is condemned to an existential impasse. But it’s not all bad news. As Isaiah Berlin wrote in an essay on identity (“Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity”), this impasse sometimes spawns pearls of genius. Is All Russians Love Birch Trees one such pearl?

Grjasnowa is a perceptive writer and a capable storyteller. Yet something rings false here. It is not the typical afflictions (IKEA-like minimalism, pervasive hollowness, threadbare style) plaguing much of the modern European fiction that comes my way, but a palpable lack of nuance that undermines the text. Germany is presented as little more than a miasma of xenophobia and seems to be an election away from a new Third Reich. The Germans in the novel — men especially — have no redeeming qualities. A hospital doctor asks Maria if he can use her first name since her last name is too difficult to pronounce (come on — it’s Kogan, not Yastrzhembsky). The priest at Elias’s funeral nods curtly at her. When a close friend of Maria’s, a German of Turkish extraction, causes a minor car accident, he is subjected to a racist diatribe. Even a trip to a gas station comes with a reminder, however innocuous, that there are Germans and then there are Germans.

When Maria shares a rest stop with a group of German soldiers, who are minding their own business, she asks herself if “they thought of African-Americans on their shooting ranges and yelled Motherfucker.” Those German men who are not treating Maria as a foreigner, treat her as a piece of meat. Has Germany run out of human beings? Her ill-fated Teutonic boyfriend Elias is nice enough but, in his hospital bed, he performs rather poorly in his role of Fifth Business. And even Elias seems to have doubts about Maria’s immigrant past. He is right to be suspicious, but he is deceived in a more banal fashion — while Elias is busy fending off the Grim Reaper in the hospital, Maria gets drunk and, inexplicably, has sex with a former boyfriend. This is not her only lapse of morality. She makes a bizarre sacrifice for the sake of Elias, to a God she doesn’t believe in and with appropriate results, by bashing a rabbit’s head in with a rock. She sleeps with a high-flying translator to further her career prospects. But let us not cast the first stone; characters owe the reader nothing. Maria’s has not been an easy life, and her defensive posture (of the I-may-have-been-born-in-a-geographic-cul-de-sac-but-I-am-multilingual-and-can-tell-Rostropovich-from-Yo-Yo-Ma” variety) is almost endearing.

Characters need not be paragons of probity. Nevertheless, it is telling that the only positive characters in the novel are those who, like Maria, belong nowhere. Men like her former boyfriend Sami (German-born Arab), with whom she betrays Elias, and her close friend Cem (German-born Turk), with whom there is no betrayal, not least because Cem is gay. Maria herself is not immune to the ways of Sappho (falling back on Anne Frank’s diary, of all things, to bestow an imprimatur on her own same-sex attraction) and confesses to her mother she’s had an abortion, so now all the right boxes have been checked off.

Israel gets no more nuance than Germany. Maria’s innate foreignness is driven home to her as soon as she presents her passport for inspection at Ben Gurion International Airport. Whereas a German doctor found Maria’s last name too Jewish, an Israeli passport control officer takes issue with her first name, which is unimpeachably Gentile, all the more so when it is right next to “Kogan.” The interaction is almost comic, but what follows is not: the Arabic characters on Maria’s computer keyboard are deemed to be a security issue, and the device is immediately confiscated and executed (literally — when the remains of her computer are displayed, Maria sees three bullet holes in its white case; while the Israeli state eventually compensates her, she only gets eighty cents on the dollar).

It doesn’t get much better once Maria leaves the airport. Everyone she meets leads a one-dimensional existence; Israeli or Arab, they think only of Zionism and the Palestinian situation. Weighty issues, I am sure, in that part of the world — but to reduce the entire country and its inhabitants to that? The lives of everyone in Maria’s orbit are framed by her own escape from, or quest for, identity and meaning, and so are rendered meaningless. The plot has a caricatural feel about it, which is generally not what you want in a novel unless it’s a work of satire. In the end, Maria is defeated by her existential drama, and All Russians Love Birch Trees is defeated by its own ambitiousness. Grjasnowa packs too much into a text of just over 300 pages and inevitably overshoots.

This is the kind of book that would appeal to a literary committee, but great art is made of sturdier stuff. I wouldn’t have bothered reviewing this novel if I couldn’t relate to it on a personal level. As a product of the 20th century and its convulsions, I am no stranger to the concept of cultural displacement. History is fascinating, but perhaps one’s life is best spent outside of it. To Maria’s heartrending wish to live in a place where there is running water, electricity, and where no one is killed, I can only say, “I hear you, girl.” In this imperfect world, that is as close to an idyll as it gets. Grjasnowa had extraordinary material at her disposal. I wish she had made better use of it.