A woman growing up in a family of Russian immigrants in the 1910s seeks a thoroughly American life.
Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who are building a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. However, Yelena craves a different path. Will she find her happy American ending or will a dreaded Russian ending be her fate?
In this immersive novel, Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga within the storied American landscape. The challenges facing immigrants—and the fragility of citizenship—are just as unsettling and surprising today as they were 100 years ago. American Ending is a poignant reminder that everything that is happening in America has already happened.
Genre: Historical
Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who are building a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married off at fourteen. The young pair up, give birth to more babies than they can feed, and make shaky starts in their new world. However, Yelena craves a different path. Will she find her happy American ending or will a dreaded Russian ending be her fate?
In this immersive novel, Zuravleff weaves Russian fairy tales and fables into a family saga within the storied American landscape. The challenges facing immigrants—and the fragility of citizenship—are just as unsettling and surprising today as they were 100 years ago. American Ending is a poignant reminder that everything that is happening in America has already happened.
Genre: Historical
Praise for this book
"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
"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
"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
"In the dark of Pennsylvania's coal mines, Yelena's voice is both the light and the canary. Her struggles, and those of her Russian-American immigrant community, are deeply felt and beautifully written. Immersive and compelling." - Helen Simonson
"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
"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
"In the dark of Pennsylvania's coal mines, Yelena's voice is both the light and the canary. Her struggles, and those of her Russian-American immigrant community, are deeply felt and beautifully written. Immersive and compelling." - Helen Simonson
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