2023-05-24
In early 20th-century mining country, a tough little girl digs herself out of a life without choices.
“The Pittsburg-Buffalo Company supplied Pa with a single ticket to come to Marianna in 1898, and selling all they could, floorboards to doorknobs, only raised enough for one more ticket. If Pa came alone, he wouldn’t get a house; if Ma came with him, they’d have to leave the girls behind. So Baba made up a room in their house for her precious granddaughters, and Ma and Pa promised to send for them within a year. But instead of getting their two girls back, they got me, their first American, on January 31, 1899.” Yelena Federoff is a born storyteller, raised on folktales with “Russian endings,” which are the sort where the wolf eats the bride “eyelash to toenail.” This little girl, who is pulled out of school to take care of babies and help keep house before she gets to sixth grade, learns early that real life offers few American endings, where the bride hops out unharmed. Zuravleff’s tale follows Yelena to the age of 20, by which point she has made a few decisions of her own despite the 1908 mining disaster, problematic immigration laws, the Spanish flu epidemic, the reactionary culture of the Old Believers of the Russian Orthodox Church, and plenty of “Foolish Questions,” a long-running real-life newspaper feature with sarcastic answers to stupid queries. All of this is so thoroughly kneaded into the story you won't stop to wonder at the research that yeasted this novel until you finish it. In Yelena’s voice, sprinkled with Russian words and early-20th-century idioms, a whole world comes steaming to life: the horrors of the mine, the closeness of the ethnic neighborhoods surrounding it, the babble of the schoolhouse, the smells of the kitchen, and so much more. When her little brother invents a cage with an air tank attached, so that a canary can do its job in the mine without having to die for it, it seems a metaphor for the love that kept these immigrant families going through the hardest of hardscrabble times.
The narrator’s voice and her story are so unusually vivid it feels like Zuravleff is channeling a real person.
It’s small acts of inventiveness, generosity, and love that keep individuals going when hard times close in. This is the wisdom and warmth of American Ending, which resurrects a community of immigrants from a century ago in magical, living detail to tell a story that rings true in the present."—Oprah Daily
"The narrator’s voice and her story are so unusually vivid it feels like Zuravleff is channeling a real person."—Kirkus
"As [the main character] Yelena comes of age and looks on as her family and neighbors stumble through a series of weddings and births (all with copious amounts of vodka), she begins to question whether this is the life for her. Zuravleff richly describes the hardscrabble setting, capturing the horrific working conditions, her characters’ will to provide for their families, and how all of it is stifling to Yelena. Fans of 20th-century immigrant stories ought to take a look."—Publishers Weekly
"How I loved spending time with Yelena in her vivid, terrible and—most astonishingly—joyous time and place. Mary Kay Zuravleff’s novel manages to capture all the struggle and the grief endured by this particular, unsung set of immigrants without ever veering into caricature or melodrama. In Yelena’s clear-eyed telling, in her honesty and love, every painful obstacle to attaining that intractable American promise of a better life is made unique—wholly fresh and achingly believable. Oh, and the food! Gorgeous.”—Alice McDermott, author of The Ninth Hour and Charming Billy
“Did Mary Kay Zuravleff time travel to write this book? It’s as if she truly lived in the past—all the details so vivid, and real—to bring us a novel of the moment. It is the old and forever new story of immigration.”—Jane Hamilton, author of Map of the World
“I fell in love with Yelena—from the very start she reminded me of My Antonia! So many stories of immigration focus on the men, but it’s the women who kept the family together, had the courage to leave their villages, who stuck it out in a strange land. In American Ending, Mary Kay Zuravleff has created an unforgettable heroine, one with the courage to write her own story and the creativity and heart to not just pull herself out of her circumstances, but to bring others with her. That is one of the great achievements of this novel: Not just the individual grit of the immigrant, but the communal spirit that lifts all the newcomers, the thousands strands that bind us all together, the activists who make sure that fairness prevails, the unions. It is such a deeply felt, humane and timeless treatment of a timeless story. And it gives so much to reflect upon in our current moment.”—Ana Menéndez, author of The Apartment and Loving Che
“American Ending is an exhilarating new take on the great American immigration story, a coming-of-age and getting-of-wisdom tale about what this country promises and withholds. Its young heroine is a funny, smart, and heartbreaking guide to a world full of cruelties and wonders. Mary Kay Zuravleff has given us a vivid, unforgettable portrait of an immigrant community and the wry, richly colored, and darkly enchanting stories it tells itself to survive.”—Margaret Talbot, New Yorker staff writer
